Python is a good language and so is R. I don't understand the sentiment that the language is "lagging" behind Python.
It is frustrating to read these opinions on the final death of R, but as a R user the language has real grown by leaps and bounds. Sure Python is a nice language that has packages for Data Science. I even started in Python but R has won me over for data science due to it being language specific. As you look at the growth of R in recent years and it over taking over Data Science I still run into these ideas that R is antiquated and "lagging behind" when it usually is Python and Pandas catching up in actual practice.
The parent specifically said for Deep Learning though.
As someone who switched from R to Python 18 months ago, I haven't kept up to date in R world. What is the equivalent of Theano (and the packages built on top of it) in R?
There are a few R packages for deep learning, although I wouldn't say that they compare with Theano yet. There's darch (package for deep architectures and Restricted-Bolzmann-Machines) [1], deepnet [2] which is incorporated into caret which is nice, and gputools [3] which has some of the GPU operations found in Theano.
It is frustrating to read these opinions on the final death of R, but as a R user the language has real grown by leaps and bounds. Sure Python is a nice language that has packages for Data Science. I even started in Python but R has won me over for data science due to it being language specific. As you look at the growth of R in recent years and it over taking over Data Science I still run into these ideas that R is antiquated and "lagging behind" when it usually is Python and Pandas catching up in actual practice.
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/11/new-surveys-show...