We agree it is simple, but actually, it isn’t so much Python per se, it is some pretty cool libraries (SciPy, in particular) that do all the hard work. That may be splitting hairs, but it is ...

Unlike R, Python has no clear “winning” IDE. We recommend Spyder because it is well-designed for scientific computing and the popular packages associated with this type of work (NumPy, SciPy, pandas, ...