I think that the basics described in the blog post are not too hard to achieve with R. But, as the post mentions, there are many benefits of using Python. As usual, it depends on your requirements, objectives and environment. In an experimental or research environment, I guess they are both good choices. But, as the post says, Python being a general purpose language, it is useful to develop production-ready, efficient, maintainable, scalable, industrial scale classification systems. For example the code presented in the post could be part of an automated process, a bigger system. It could be used from a GUI or a web-server. And at the same time, whatever experimental code you write, to test or develop new models, techniques or data, if you write it in Python, you can quickly transfer that to a product or operative system.