Comment by vkazanov
3 days ago
When the first scientific libraries were written for python, most alternatives didn't even consider being readable, or convenient. The choice was more like C/Cpp/Fortran vs Python.
And then Python went into a self-reinforcing loop, with scientific community coming up with more and more ways to improve Python support for the kind of interactive work that was required for data analysis. Think ipython -> jupyter -> jupyter forks and other python-centric notebook systems.
So when data analysis evolved into data science and machine learning, gpu-first library vendors already faced a crowd of people knowing python.
It is crazy how right now one can utilize 100s of gpus through these bits of dirty python wrapped in json.
I think you're forgetting perl (plus other unix utils) and matlab. PDL (perl data language) was a thing, as was IDL (and other similar tools).