2014 was another transformative, exciting year for data science. Summarizing even one measly year of progress is difficult! Here, in no particular order, are five trends that caught my attention. They are are likely to continue in 2015.

Adoption of higher productivity analytics programming environments. Traditional languages and environments such as C, C++, and SAS, are diminishing in importance as R, Python, and Scala ascend. It is not that data scientists are dumping the old stuff; it is that a flood of new data scientists have entered the fray, overwhelmingly choosing more modern environments. These newer systems provide language conveniences as well as a rich library of built-in (or easy to install) libraries that handle higher abstraction analytics-related tasks. Modern data scientists don’t want to write CSV read routines, JSON parsers, SQL INSERTs or logging systems. R is notable in the sense that its productivity gains come from its packages…