> I think people way over-index Python as the language for data science. It has limitations that I think are quite noteworthy. There are many data-science tasks I’d much rather do in R than in Python.

R is kind of a super-specialized language. Python is much more general purpose.

R failed to evolve, let's be honest. Python won via jupyter - I see this used ALL the time in universities. R is used too, but mostly for statistics related courses only, give or take.

Perhaps R is better for its niche, but Python has more momentum and in thus, dominates over R. That's simply the reality of the situation. It is like the bulldozer moving forward, at a fast speed.

> I say “This is great, but could you quickly plot the data in this other way?”

Ok so ... he would have to adjust R code too, right? And finding good info on that is simply harder. He says he has experience with universities. Well, I do too, and my experience is that people are WAY better with python than with R. You simply see that more students will drop out from R than from python. That's also simply the reality of the situation.

> They appear to be sufficiently cumbersome or confusing that requests that I think should be trivial frequently are not.

I am sure the reverse also applies. Pick some python library, do something awesome, then tell the R students to do the same. I bet he will have the same problems.

> So many times, I felt that things that would be just a few lines of simple R code turned out to be quite a bit longer and fairly convoluted.

Ok, so here he is trolling. Flat out - I said it.

I wrote a LOT of python and quite a bit of R. There is no way in life that the R code is more succinct than the python code for about 90% of the use cases out there. Sorry, that's simply not the case. R is more verbose.

> Here is the relevant code in R, using the tidyverse approach:

    penguins |>
      filter(!is.na(body_mass_g)) |>
      group_by(species, island) |>
      summarize(

This professor just hasn't realised that he is slowly becoming a fossil himself, by being unable to see that x is better than y.

> R failed to evolve, let's be honest. Python won via jupyter

Ju = Julia Pyt = Python Er = R

R is not only supported in Jupyter, it was there from the start. I’ve never written a single line of R. It is bizarre how little people know about their tools.