Sure. But the point of the article is that R is the de facto language for data science and is strongest than the alternatives in key areas such as data manipulation, data visualisation and machine learning.
Hmm. Parent's point is still valid. A language can be (a) excellent at what it was designed to do and (b) poor at what it wasn't designed to do. R is a statistical language first and foremost. My experience is that R is not used in production systems, and has serious PL warts compared to other languages.
Also note: between scikit-learn and pandas, Python is also excellent at ML and data manipulation.
