Good post! R is not on a decline, and I agree with you about the TIOBE being held up as an indicator of popularity. The major problem with the TIOBE rankings is that they don't really get to the subsets of users for a given language. R has a lot of users who are interested in the statistically nature of the data and its context to real world problems, ranging from biology to social issues. John Hopkins relied on R for its COVID-19 trend analysis. I think pitting one language users against another misses the point of the real innovation arriving as time goes on -- many developers have found ways to work across languages. There's a framework for using React with Python, another for React with R -- you have libraries designed to run Python within R (reticulate), plus operational libraries like Pins and Shiny that allow users to run with either Python or R. Posit's decision to incorporate Python is more a reflection of the new capabilities. The use of AI Copilots will blend and blur lines further. It does not matter what programmer "pedigree" was used -- if someone understands the basics of EDA and ETL, language syntax will be a secondary concern.