The first line: "Nowadays Python is probably the programming language of choice (besides R) ..."

Personally I am not ready to hand the title "langauge of choice" to Python, although it is trending that way. We should give R credit where credit is due. There is still a huge population of R users and code. Python has advantages in that the syntax is easier to understand, and so is the structure (object oriented versus scripting). What Python lacks is a simple setup. I think that once Python becomes more accessible to everyone (as far as downloading Python, setting up directories, packages, libraries, etc.), it will have huge leaps in usage.