While [Active Papers] has achieved its mission of demonstrating that unifying computational reproducibility and provenance tracking is doable and useful, it has also demonstrated that Python is not a suitable platform to build on for reproducible research. Breaking changes at all layers of the software stack are too frequent.
Konrad Hinsen in Archiving Active Papers
I started using Python for my PhD around 1997, to control simulations I wrote using Fortran 90. I chose Python based on Konrad Hinsen’s writings at the time in a long-disappeared website. A few years later I moved all my work to R, which I found much more stable. I have some 20-year-old R base code that still runs. 
Incidentally, last year I wrote a series of posts on Some love for base R.