I’m going on a limb here and may get downvoted. But I’ll say it anyway. This battle is over, and Python is now the standard for data science, just like git is the standard for version control. The mindshare, number of tools, and number of people that know and use Python is an order of magnitude higher those for R. As a new data scientist it does not make sense to start with anything but Python.

This is manifestly untrue in some areas, for example bioinformatics.