Bill Vorhies lays out a controversial argument:
I have been a practicing data scientist with an emphasis on predictive modeling for about 16 years. I know enough R to be dangerous but when I want to build a model I reach for my SAS Enterprise Miner (could just as easily be SPSS, Rapid Miner or one of the other complete platforms).
The key issue is that I can clean, prep, transform, engineer features, select features, and run 10 or more model types simultaneously in less than 60 minutes (sometimes a lot less) and get back a nice display of the most accurate and robust model along with exportable code in my selection of languages.
The reason I can do that is because these advanced platforms now all have drag-and-drop visual workspaces into which I deploy and rapidly adjust each major element of the modeling process without ever touching a line of code.
I have almost exactly the opposite thought on the matter: that drag-and-drop development is intolerably slow; I can drag and drop and connect and click and click and click for a while, or I can write a few lines of code. Nevertheless, I think Bill’s post is well worth reading.