Ask HN: Introducing my Wife to Programming for Data Analysis

TLDR; Person with MSSQL query background is new to programming wants to learn. Should she learn R or Python and where is a good place for her to start?

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My wife is an economist for the state of Minnesota. She and her department deal with data on economic growth and unemployment statistics. The mostly rely on SQL to parse their data.

She is in the position to introduce a new way of handling statistical computing and took my advice and bought an R book. The book makes too many assumptions about her background, so it's not very helpful. When we began discussing this, I started to think that Python may be more helpful and more generalized for their needs.

Where would be a good place for her to start? Is R or Python the "correct" way to introduce her to this world of ours and which should she consider if she eventually wants to become the evangelist in her department to get others to adopt it?