> People say R is the best and optimized for data-analytics which is simply not true. It's a marketing-lie spread by the creators. There is no data-analytics-task that you cannot do with the same ease in other programming languages.

Really? Maybe you worked with R before data.table, dplyr, and the tidyverse packages? I'm not that familiar with pandas in Python, but there is an incredible amount of productivity to be gained from knowing your way around a set of just around 5 packages in R that I never had when working with C++, Java, Perl, or Ruby.

Also, it could just be me, but I overcome the = and <- confusion by simply never using =.