Comment by 7thaccount

It's really just that it's a pretty easy language to learn that finds a good balance between structure and brevity. It has very good support for the data structures you need and libraries for everything. A lot of people love the language and that built up a lot of momentum and eventually people started adding stuff like numpy and scipy and pandas and before long you had this giant scientific computing environment that almost anyone can get into.

I tried out most of the scripting languages out there (Ruby, Perl, Tcl, Groovy, R, and many more) and Python just seemed to click more and it has a whole lot less to worry about upfront than languages like C# and Java. In comparison to languages like C and C++, it's a godsend for those with typical automation needs.

In my eyes it seems like a pretty straightforward development. There have been plenty of other tools that may have made sense throughout history too. Matlab could have done this, but by that time nobody was going to build out massive libraries for something expensive and partly closed off.