[mellavora]

"Same issue as Excel, really. Easy to use, so you get a lot of users with very thin engineering skills."

Huh?

While I totally agree with your quote, I'd think it applied a lot more to python than to R. Especially given that python seems to be the dominant "first language for people to learn when they get into programming" because it is "easy".

[civilized]

The proportion in R is higher because the community of software engineers working in R is a lot smaller. R coders are overwhelmingly data analysts, while Python coders have more diverse roles. People who use R are also much more likely to have learned R, and only R, from their university courses towards a data science-related degree, especially if that degree is in statistics.

[dragonwriter]

R is a language people use when they get into statistics, not even thinking specifically of programming.