Seems like the quote is a non-statement given that Apple's bug report system is a black hole. Big talk as usual from Pythonistas without any connection to reality.
Students I spoke to were forced to use SAS. They looked at me as if I was from Mars for suggesting alternatives.
For a "big data" project, people will probably use Python (though Google apparently retreats from it except in machine learning).
Why could you not use R and C++ or Java though? For example, Arrow has bindings for both, so the argument that Python is needed to shovel/scrape/steal data becomes less and less valid.
