[TWAndrews]

I believe that over time, it will become the standard for statistical computing in most businesses, eventually displacing much of what SAS does today.

It's attractive to embed into databases like Neteeza, Teradata and other analytic databases, and vastly easier to use than SAS.

Even if it was rewritten in python, I think that would be unlikely to slow down it's adoption, which is driven by grad-students, researchers and quants who often have no real programming background (and frequently aren't interested in learning more than they need to generate figures for their publications).