I'm in political science, and I'm pretty surprised how aware of open source tech some of my professors are, R especially. But I've even heard from a few of them a desire to pick up Python or C++ for other data work, and at least one of them knows emacs.
Proprietary software like STATA still gets used as much or more than R, but hopefully it continues to pick up steam. R Studio in particular is a pretty compelling environment.
Interesting, that's a domain I'm just getting into, can you point me towards projects and research at the intersection of political science and data science/programming?
I tried to do some searching for some specific projects that I've heard of but I'm coming up blank.
Really any decent quantitative study that isn't just an absolute basic regression is going to have degree of data processing done to it. Not exciting, but it is there and on a large level.
The other more interesting projects are doing stuff like scraping news sources, constitutions, etc, using natural language processing to pick out relevant parts and then matching those to some kind of database in order to code the necessary data.
Proprietary software like STATA still gets used as much or more than R, but hopefully it continues to pick up steam. R Studio in particular is a pretty compelling environment.