1) The language was created by a researcher (Guido Van Rossum) at a research facility in the Netherlands [1]
2) Network effect - as more machine learning researchers and engineers in academia used it, the need for a language that could integrate with FORTRAN with similar performance came about, which lead to NumPy, SciPy, etc.
3) The language itself is pretty simple to grasp. There's multiple ways in Ruby itself to do something, while in Python there's at most one way to do something. Anecdotal - a lot of researchers I've worked with care more about the usability and ease of adoption of a language, compared to the expressivity.
1) The language was created by a researcher (Guido Van Rossum) at a research facility in the Netherlands [1]
2) Network effect - as more machine learning researchers and engineers in academia used it, the need for a language that could integrate with FORTRAN with similar performance came about, which lead to NumPy, SciPy, etc.
3) The language itself is pretty simple to grasp. There's multiple ways in Ruby itself to do something, while in Python there's at most one way to do something. Anecdotal - a lot of researchers I've worked with care more about the usability and ease of adoption of a language, compared to the expressivity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)#...