“The Adventure of Pinocchio” is the most translated book besides the bible. It was written in 1883 by the Italian Author Carlo Collodi (sorry, it was not created by Disney) and it has been translated to more than 250 languages. This means that the story about Pinocchio is more meaningful than the actual language it was written in. Even the most popular version is not in Italian, his original language.
A couple of days ago, while trying to fit a perceptron using Python, I realize that I was investing more time and effort trying to get the machine to work than analyzing the actual problem. I was focusing more in the language than on my Pinocchio’s story. This is problematic because my Pinocchio story is also going to be translated into several languages, such as finance or marketing. The readers most probably will not care about the original language, rather only about the story.
Don’t get me wrong, knowing how to use different tools is very important but understanding the analysis is paramount. During my undergraduate degree I used Stata to learn econometrics. That was the first and last time that I used it. However, I use Econometrics on all sort of realms throughout all sort of software and programming languages. I just need to know the language well enough for me to be able to right the story.
For instance, recently I have been fitting Machine Learning and Neural Network algorithms using both R and Python. Even though I prefer R (calm down serpentine friends), I must say that in a couple of years, it might be irrelevant. More and more machine learning algorithms are going to be fully integrated on software or APIs, rendering the application of them as trivial as adding two cells in Excel. In fact, Excel has an Adding to connect to all Azure’s Machine Learning capabilities without coding a single line.
Everyday, we are bombarded by a new app, software, programming language that it’s going to make our lives easier. Alteryx, Knime, RapidMiner are now hot words and they are fantastic: Alteryx streamline your data cleaning and manipulation process; Knime is the new open source platform for data mining and machine learning and RapidMiner automates the machine learning pipeline. If you think they would increase your productivity, by all means, learn about these programs. But never forget that these are only tools and not the actual story. Is better for you to focus on the story; your Pinocchio is going to be translated to other languages anyway.