Totally. I’ve taught intro R to mostly social scientists, and intro Python to mostly physical scientists. Every workshop, the R group is coding circles around t

Totally. I’ve taught intro R to mostly social scientists, and intro Python to mostly physical scientists. Every workshop, the R group is coding circles around the Python group with the same number of hours of instruction. And the intro R curriculum that we use was largely a ported version of the Python curriculum. Having seen brand new scientific programmers tackle two “beginner friendly” languages, man the differences after a day or two are stark.