This is true, I've found teaching r to get things done is very fast and readable fully achievable in a semester compared to teaching pandas (and also having to teach how to program in python)

And people wishing to delve even deeper switch back to R? I don't use it, but I understood that most advanced techniques in statistics are implemented first, and sometimes only, as R packages, no?

this is kinda funny to me. practically every social scientist I’ve known that had to use R was appalled by how cryptic and unintuitive it was.

I always understood that it was its open source nature being a successor to the S language that gave it traction