re: Free coding software Suggestions?

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don't doubt that Python programmers exist, but they must exist in some field that I've just never worked in. I've done everything from x86 assembly up to React.js and I still cannot figure what in the world Python is actually used for (that people pay money for).

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Machine learning

I know next to nothing about Ruby except Ruby on rails is used for web dev somewhat popularly. I've dabbled a little in ML/AI and everything surrounding that is Python it seems. All the job listings I've seen for Python are some kind of ML/AI/Heavy data analysis jobs and all the job listings I've seen surrounding Ruby is for Ruby on rails devs. It just seems based on my limited knowledge Python has gone from the joke language to a very serious skill recently. As Ruby has Ruby on rails for web dev, Python has Django. But the favorable libraries for ML from tensorflow to scikitlearn to my knowledge seem to be exclusive to Python with the exception of Tensorflow.js for node.js.

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I've been using R for a while for most stuff, especially stats. Tableau for visualization. Thinking about learning Python for data management and web scraping. Worth it?

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If you are interested in web scraping then python is probably a great solution. Plenty of packages that semi-work out of the box... or so i'm told by some of the guys I work with. Not my main focus.

We use spotfire for visualization which now includes native python. Useful that we can contain everything including py scripts in one main application.

On the data side you can get pretty far with numpy/scipy/pandas. Will be little slower to run (faster to implement) than R but only a limiting factor when you are dealing with massive datasets. There are some workarounds such as cython which allow static typing / compiling for speed improvements (the idea is C speed with mostly python code)

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If you are interested in web scraping then python is probably a great solution. Plenty of packages that semi-work out of the box... or so i'm told by some of the guys I work with. Not my main focus.

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I do a lot of webscraping in Node.js with libraries like Pupiteer or Phantom or Got, or even just the now deprecated Request and Cheerio. I've so done a little webscraping with Beautiful soup in Python. Not sure if Beautifulsoup offers this, but a good quality of Pupiteer is the ability to allow JavaScript to run before scraping since so many sites rely of JavaScript to generate the data you want to scrape. Again, since JavaScript is single threaded you wouldn't want a lot of clients trying to scrape at the same time, but if one client is trying to scrape one site Pupiteer is hard to beat.