I doubt anyone doing data analysis is unfamiliar with R, as it is the current standard. The push to use Python, or Julia, or a version of Lisp (hey, we had that in the 1990s -- us olds remember xlispstat) for data analysis is coming from the people who find R to be a rather unpleasant language. Which is a subjective opinion, obviously, but not an uncommon one.

Learning Functional Programming (I learned Racket) makes R great since it really is a functional language.