re: python vs. R

I haven't done python at all, but from reading bits and piece online, it seems to me that Python is a lot more about ML than Statistics.

Also, how does one decide what is a "data scientist"? Is it only people who do Stats+ML+IT? What about a researcher in economics or biology? Or marketing. Are those included? They do a lot of Stats and increasingly a lot of ML. Not so much information technology though (less concerned with data storage and retrieval, because they have other people to do that for them). I'd venture to say that researchers like that are far bigger number than pure play data scientists and would be interesting to see the technical skills for them. I bet SPSS and SAS would look a lot more in demand.