As much as I like Python and personally prefer it to R, I don’t really disagree. But I’m not sure R is a great language for data science either—it has its own weaknesses, e.g., writing custom loops (or functional equivalents with map or reduce) was pretty clunky last I tried it.

The other thing is that a lot of R’s strengths are really the tidyverse’s. Some of that is to R’s credit as an extensible language that enables a skilled API designer to really shine of course, but I think there’s no reason Python the language couldn’t have similar libraries. In fact it has, in plotnine. (I haven’t tried Polars yet but it does at least seem to have a more consistent API.)