R and Matlab workflows have been fairly stable for the past decade. Why is the Python ecosystem so... unstable? It puts me off investing any time in it.

The R ecosystem has had a similar evolution with the tidyverse, it was just a little further ago. As for Matlab, I initially learned statistical programming with it a long time ago, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it in the wild. I don’t know what’s going on there.

I’m actually quite partial to R myself, and I used to use it extensively back when quick analysis was more valuable to my career. Things have probably progressed, but I dropped it in favor of python because python can integrate into production systems whereas R was (and maybe still is) geared towards writing reports. One of the best things to happen recently in data science is the plotnine library, bringing the grammar of graphics to python imho.

The fact is that today, if you want career opportunities as a data scientist, you need to be fluent in python.

I love R, but how can you make that claim when R uses three distinct object-oriented systems all at the same time? R might seem stable only because it carries along with it 50 years of history of programming languages (part of it's charm, where else can you see the generic function approach to OOP in a language that's still evolving?)

Finally, as someone who wrote a lot of R pre-tidyverse, I've seen the entire ecosystem radically change over my career.

Outside bioconductor or the tidyverse in R can be just as unstable due to CRAN's package requirements.