[huac]

From a statistics perspective R is the language to learn.

Python is good for data engineering or pipelining, etc - but R is the best for analysis:

- Rstudio is a much more friendly interface than IPython/Jupyter notebooks

- Python's visualization libraries can't come close to ggplot2

- Python lacks an effective grammar of data manipulation better similar to dplyr or magrittr.

I think HN is more engineering focused, hence increased exposure to Python. At the places I've worked/interviewed for data science, 1 was full Python (though they have a high eng bar for data scientists, and very few data engineers), and the rest had a reasonable split of R and Python. Your SO will be fine either way but might find R more intuitive and better suited to statistics work.