Anaconda announced the results of their first “state of data science” survey today. Out of the 4,218 responses, 26% were from students, 16% were from data scientists, 15% were academics and 15% were software developers.
The key takeaways according to Anaconda are as follows:
- 99% of respondents use Anaconda for Python
- Docker and Kubernetes is beating out Hadoop / Spark.
- Google Cloud data services beat out Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure
- Matplotlib is still the top package for visualization. However “Plotly, Tableau, Microsoft Power BI and Tibco Spotfire are all strong commercial
competitors to Matplotlib and other open source projects like ggplot, Bokeh, D3 and Altair.” - 14% of respondents do machine learning with Anaconda
- The fact that Anaconda is free was ranked as its most important attribute while the fact that it has open source licensing was second to last.
That last bullet point kind of bothers me, but I guess students don’t understand the importance of open source. Regardless, this is a really interesting survey on one of the top alternative versions of the Python distribution. You can read the full announcement here.