Why our machine learning platform supports Python, not R

There are dozens of articles written comparing the relative merits of Python and R for data science, and this isn't one of them. Instead, this an article about the divergence of data analysts and machine learning engineers, and their differing needs in a programming language. The simple version is that machine learning engineers are, fundamentally, software engineers, and they use programming languages designed for software engineering--not statistics. This may sound fairly obvious, but it represents a change in the machine learning ecosystem, one that is worth diving into further. Comparisons of R and Python often highlight perceived advantages of either language that are, at best, marginal and subjective.