R has a lot of choices. I find that the Hadley Universe of libraries of ggplot2, ggvis, dplyr, tidyr, stringr, readr and others with the piping of %&gt;% to be the easiest code for reading and getting things done. R has been transformed in the last 5 years but still gets a bad rap which I don&#x27;t feel it deserves.<p>R is really more a functional language which most people don&#x27;t recognize and when they learn the standard core of R with Lisp inspired ideas it really throws them for a loop. I ended up learning Racket (after trying to teach myself Haskell 3 times) and I can say I now &quot;get it,&quot; but using the new libraries has really made that point mute.<p>I love R and am excited to see all the support from Microsoft and other large companies jumping on board.<p>This does look like a decent way to move to Python though. If someone was to do that I hope they use Rodeo IDE.