[specproc]

R is definitely a good language for quant work. In some ways it could have been the natural choice, and there are still places where it's a better choice than Python.

It's just far to fragmented, only really good for numeric work (and thus harder to integrate with production systems), and full of the weirdest gotchas.

https://www.burns-stat.com/pages/Tutor/R_inferno.pdf

[mFixman]

R has a few advantages over Python for data science work, but Python has a big one: it's also widely used by software engineers who are not data scientists.

I found it easy to jump from the software side of things to the data side of things because I already knew the quirks and tricks of Python. Having to learn a new language would have made this transition harder.