FWIW, I do prefer R to all other "notebook" languages. It has everything I need for answering questions about data, working with files, text, and visualization.

FWIW, I do prefer R to all other "notebook" languages. It has everything I need for answering questions about data, working with files, text, and visualization. Libraries that do everything I could imagine are easily available. For me it's a pragmatic workhorse tool that I use and aside from frequently getting frustrated with the task at hand, it has never failed me in the end. I think R is much like a handheld power tool. I have no interest in diving deep into the workings of the tool because when I need to use a drill, for instance, I just need to drill holes and anything else is an annoying distraction (I realize that sounds bad!). I've also worked with Mathematica and JMP in the past. They're very capable, but not as good at general-purpose data-wrangling as R is today (given Rstudio, knitr, shiny, all the specialized libraries, and most especially the tidyverse).