In my case, I found R a better tool for learning DS, as it is more or less, a DSL for statistics, and feels more low level and fores you to learn more fundamentals than python. For production it is probably worse tan python, true.
Of course that doesn't make it a DSL. It simply means that R was designed with a particular application in mind. So was Perl (regular expressions as first-class citizens) or Javascript (DOM manipulation). Not to mention PHP.