The best free programming languages for data visualization

It used to be enough to just know a few tools like Excel and PowerPoint to put together reports and graphs. Now days it's not enough! You need to be able to make power and beautiful visualizations for big datasets!

Thankfully there are a bunch of amazing and free programming languages available. These languages are easy to learn, cost nothing, and can run on any computer (windows, mac, linux, whatever!)

Here are our top picks for 2014:

4. R

Most often associated with statistics, R is the best language for quickly doing simple regression, function fitting, statistical analysis or quick visualization. R is simple to download and install, and even comes with a built-in IDE  aka an interactive development environment, or in this case it's an interactive data environment!

3. ggplot

Imagine if all the default settings for making graphics and visualizations were actually good! That's what ggplot is. This is an add-on to R, but really is it's own beast!  Make plots that don't suck, use ggplot2!

2. Javascript

Javascript is rapidly becoming the best language for the internet. With amazing visualization packages like d3 that render graphics in your browser, it's easy to see why this is the fastest growing data viz language of 2014. The learning curve can be high, but if you master javascript then you can master it's cousin typescript that Microsoft is excited about! Many jobs are looking for javascript experience these days, so new data designers should invest some time getting familiar with this new standard.

1. Python

Python is probably the best all-around programming language to learn for lots of things. Data visualization is no exception. Python can make animated gifs, export movies, render high resolution graphics, all with a few simple commands to packages like matplotlib. Many famous data designers, scientists, and engineers use Python for their entire workflow. Imagine: data munging, cleaning, ingesting, analyzing, fitting, machine learning, and visualizing, all from within a single  and powerful dynamic programming language!