"If they can learn an easy language, they won't have to rely on an external software development group to complete their analysis."
Although scientists earn more credit here than business people, allow me to make a skeptical remark:
This is exactly the same reason they had in the past regarding with SQL. "Business people can't wait for programmers to run their queries; if they can learn an easy language, they won't have to rely on programmers to do that for them..."
In the end, the business people did not do SQL; they just force developers to do it for them, using SQL.
False. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people using SQL every day to query and analyze their data, that would not be able to write a for-loop or tell you what a pointer is. The same goes for R.
Just because the needs of business analytics have grown to a point where developers are needed to build extremely sophisticated things with SQL, does not mean that simple SQL does not serve its original purpose beautifully.
The same is true for Python. You can do incredibly sophisticated things with Python, but there are many, many scientists and data analysts that use it to do simple things that would not quite fit into a SQL mold, but also don't require a deep knowledge of CS.
Although scientists earn more credit here than business people, allow me to make a skeptical remark:
This is exactly the same reason they had in the past regarding with SQL. "Business people can't wait for programmers to run their queries; if they can learn an easy language, they won't have to rely on programmers to do that for them..."
In the end, the business people did not do SQL; they just force developers to do it for them, using SQL.
History repeats itself, perpetuating fallacies