There is something to be said to build a programing language to solve a certain task in mind.
Being vector aware and having a dataframe support in R is much more elegant for me than Python's add on library. It's like Scala building on top of Java but trying to have an Actor paradigm vs Erlang built from get go around concurrency and choosing Actor as it's main concurrency paradigm. You can see this in other language on PHP and C++ let you be OOP but it's an after thought compare to Ruby or Python.
I'm not unsympathetic to this idea, but after learning my 87th domain-specific language that couldn't be bothered with reasonable control structures, or even solid error checking, it's really starting to wear.
Statisticians aren't that interested in writing a really good programming language. And why should they be? They have better things to do. The trick is to not take on responsibility for something you don't care about, if you can help it.
Being vector aware and having a dataframe support in R is much more elegant for me than Python's add on library. It's like Scala building on top of Java but trying to have an Actor paradigm vs Erlang built from get go around concurrency and choosing Actor as it's main concurrency paradigm. You can see this in other language on PHP and C++ let you be OOP but it's an after thought compare to Ruby or Python.