[dthal]

I use both Python and R a fair bit. As a language, absolutely I prefer Python to R. However, I think there are two areas where R is better than Python and together, I think they add up to a durable advantage, at least for stats people. 1) Package support. Yes, Pandas and scikit-learn are good, but R still has a definite edge here. Here are three things I've needed lately where R has hands-down better code available: forecasting, frequent itemset mining, and network community detection. 2) Non-programming uses. There are a lot of tasks where you need a computer, but just to do one thing, a plot, calculate a statistic, ... stuff like that. R is better in that use case.