Is R still a good language to learn in 2021?

Welcome back! After scrolling through many forums for several hours I found many people talking about R and the fact that it may go extinct, this is a very common statement that i’ve also somewhat covered in a couple of other articles. The problem with this question is that R (and really most other programming languages) will always be used in some capacity, but that leads me to this question: Is R still a good language to learn? Let’s talk about this.

Starting off, R is a statistical language, it helps greatly with data processing / manipulation and even allows us to build out GUI’s with RShiny, but its main focus is around data processing. The bigger problem with this specific language is the fact that Python is quickly becoming the most popular programming language out there, because of this, R is slowly dwindling away to irrelevancy. This is (in my opinion) the biggest downside to R right now, alot more companies / individuals are using Python for the same things that people would typically use R for, so many potential R users are moving over to Python because of this. I have also seen that many more machine learning packages / tutorials are created for Python, so a lot of machine learning jobs are also in the court of Python.