If you're:

- working interactively (i.e. your code isn't part of a larger application)

- working with relatively small datasets that fit into memory

- don't need any deep learning libraries

then both R and Python can do a great job and choosing one over the other is simply a matter of preference. I might even lean slightly towards R because its data frames are a bit easier to use than pandas and RStudio's REPL is the best.

But if you need to deploy your code somewhere, or high performance, or the latest deep learning libraries, then Python absolutely crushes R. And it's not even close.