[mojoe]

My data science group is currently transitioning to Python-based development from R. It's actually amazing how much faster Python development is, because of two things:

1. R libraries (and even rarely the R interpreter itself!) tend to have really weird corner case bugs that crop up every couple months, and

2. It's REALLY easy to write unmaintainable code in R, and so strange cruft creeps into the code over time.

The Python interpreter and Python statistical libs are rock solid in comparison, and with it we don't spend weeks debugging things caused by unnecessary idiosyncrasies. I just wish we'd started switching sooner and saving our time.