In that case I'd suggest Julia; it's got syntax pretty much identical to R, and is just as easy to pick up, but it's much, much faster, and it works as a genera

In that case I'd suggest Julia; it's got syntax pretty much identical to R, and is just as easy to pick up, but it's much, much faster, and it works as a general-ish computing language. (It's still definitely math/science/research-oriented, but it's not like R, which is only really usable for statistics scripts.)