I disagree, the language is extremely powerful for interactive data exploration. A terse one-liner is all it takes to compute something like "what's the correlation between number of children and home size for people over 45 who live in counties with income variance at the 90th percentile weighted by population".
Not that pandas/scipy/numpy don't make an admirable job. You can do something like this, but it's nowhere near as ergonomic as it is R. At the end of the day, R is fundamentally a language for data exploration, whereas with python those facilities are bolted on top of a general purpose environment.
Not that pandas/scipy/numpy don't make an admirable job. You can do something like this, but it's nowhere near as ergonomic as it is R. At the end of the day, R is fundamentally a language for data exploration, whereas with python those facilities are bolted on top of a general purpose environment.