The landscape may have changed a bit, but this post is still relevant:
Personally, I would definitely recomend Python over any other language. Not a master of it, but already got so much out of it! For example, at my office they were trying to short big amounts of data in a particular way, impossible to do it in DS or excel. A bit of help with pandas, a Python library, and job done in an afternoon (including research time). Also, with python you can move to any other program and apply it to so many cool stuff! (machine learning, machine visualization, data processing…you name it!)