[dpwm]

Seems more like an attack on a straw-man Python ecosystem.

Section 1, on there being two versions of Python, is a bit daft. It's been settled: use 3.

Sections 2, 3 and 4 are attacking Python for not behaving in the way R does. For what it's worth, everyone struggles with objects being passed as references at some point or other -- for me it was not realising keyword function arguments' default values are evaluated at definition time, not call time. In any case, the alternatives would not work in Python.

Section 5 is attacking Python for not having RStudio. Personally, as a long term vim user, I've recently tried Spacemacs and found being able to paste to REPL a huge time-saving feature. I'm sure there are plugins for vim that can do this too, it's just it was enabled and discoverable in spacemacs.

I get that R is good for statistics. It's probably better than Python for stats. But Python is a general purpose language that really gets a lot right, which is probably one of the reasons for its growing popularity in Machine Learning.

[marmaduke]

I realize the default kwarg thing trips people up, but there’s always been this great pair of pages in the Python docs titled Data and Execution models. They take an hour or two to read, but make the language so crystal clear.