I think I have some good news for you at least (but sadly not about the fact that statistics is easiest in R than anything else though!). For context, I'm a longtime, daily emacs and python user; I used to use R and ESS more than I do now.
1. You say you use sweave and emacs . So I assume you are using Emacs Speaks Statistics[1]. Running a python REPL in emacs now works very well thanks to Fabian Gallina's python.el which is in recent releases of emacs 24. I use it as my main python REPL. Use ipython instead of python as the interpreter running inside emacs. For config, see the comments at the top of the python.el file[2].
2. ipython notebook is amazing! [3] But, we don't want to write code in a browser. Good news. You can have ipython notebook in the browser share the same python kernel as a python shell in the terminal or in emacs. The steps are: (1) `ipython notebook` in shell and watch for the localhost URL it prints out, (2) Open the URL in a browser and start a new notebook, (3) Back in the shell, it has just printed out the name of the kernel, like `Kernel started: 5df5d119-85b5-4f33-8ba1-1c6b2eaa950f`; copy that. (4) Now start a shell ipython sharing the same kernel: `ipython console --existing 5df5d119-85b5-4f33-8ba1-1c6b2eaa950f`. To do (4) in emacs, one way to add the arguments is to pass a prefix argument to run-python. So `C-u M-x run-python` and then edit the interpreter arguments in the minibuffer.
So now you can define variables, functions etc in your shell/emacs ipython, and they are available in the web browser notebook.
3. No need to write code in the browser notebook! Implement functions in .py files in emacs, and in the web browser just import modules and call functions from within them.
4. Now, I don't have experience trying to replicate the sweave workflow in ipython notebook, but it is very flexible. See ipython author Min RK's reply here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/13222501/583763. That suggests you can indeed replicate much of sweave functionality. (Typesetting mathematical notation in latex and having MathJax display it in the browser I know works beautifully).
5. You can call R from ipython notebook, see e.g. http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/ipython/ipython/blob/mast.... Rather than getting fancy, you may just want to have the R graphics device write figures to file explicitly and then work in python with those graphics files on disk.
6. There is also RPy2, I don't have much experience with that.
[1] For those not familiar, ESS is an implementation of an R REPL in emacs with extremely good usability and "feel". I would always use it over the vanilla R shell.
1. You say you use sweave and emacs . So I assume you are using Emacs Speaks Statistics[1]. Running a python REPL in emacs now works very well thanks to Fabian Gallina's python.el which is in recent releases of emacs 24. I use it as my main python REPL. Use ipython instead of python as the interpreter running inside emacs. For config, see the comments at the top of the python.el file[2].
2. ipython notebook is amazing! [3] But, we don't want to write code in a browser. Good news. You can have ipython notebook in the browser share the same python kernel as a python shell in the terminal or in emacs. The steps are: (1) `ipython notebook` in shell and watch for the localhost URL it prints out, (2) Open the URL in a browser and start a new notebook, (3) Back in the shell, it has just printed out the name of the kernel, like `Kernel started: 5df5d119-85b5-4f33-8ba1-1c6b2eaa950f`; copy that. (4) Now start a shell ipython sharing the same kernel: `ipython console --existing 5df5d119-85b5-4f33-8ba1-1c6b2eaa950f`. To do (4) in emacs, one way to add the arguments is to pass a prefix argument to run-python. So `C-u M-x run-python` and then edit the interpreter arguments in the minibuffer.
So now you can define variables, functions etc in your shell/emacs ipython, and they are available in the web browser notebook.
3. No need to write code in the browser notebook! Implement functions in .py files in emacs, and in the web browser just import modules and call functions from within them.
4. Now, I don't have experience trying to replicate the sweave workflow in ipython notebook, but it is very flexible. See ipython author Min RK's reply here: http://stackoverflow.com/a/13222501/583763. That suggests you can indeed replicate much of sweave functionality. (Typesetting mathematical notation in latex and having MathJax display it in the browser I know works beautifully).
5. You can call R from ipython notebook, see e.g. http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/ipython/ipython/blob/mast.... Rather than getting fancy, you may just want to have the R graphics device write figures to file explicitly and then work in python with those graphics files on disk.
6. There is also RPy2, I don't have much experience with that.
[1] For those not familiar, ESS is an implementation of an R REPL in emacs with extremely good usability and "feel". I would always use it over the vanilla R shell.
[2] `M-x find-library python` or https://github.com/fgallina/python.el/blob/master/python.el#...
[3] https://github.com/ipython/ipython/wiki/A-gallery-of-interes...