I only see him "lumping R in with Python" in that they're both full-blown programming languages and TFAA apparently hates them both because they're programming languages.

_delirium is merely pointing out that there are push-button packages for statistics, and that statisticians using programming languages (be they statistics-oriented or not) usually do so because they want to or because they need to (as the push-button stuff is not sufficient for their needs, for instance)