There's many programming languages where multidimensional arrays of floats are a natural language construct. From low-level (e.g. Fortran) to high level languages (e.g. Octave/Matlab, Julia). Even in C you can work with multidimensional arrays of floats, but it is a bit cumbersome. This is not the case for Python, where the language cannot express in itself this data structure, and it needs external library support like numpy.
EDIT: I'm always very surprised by the wide acceptance of python/numpy for numerical algorithms, as it seems a notion quite foreign and awkward for this language. Python has excellent native support for string processing and advanced data structures like dictionaries, but those are mostly useless for numerical computation. If you want to do math in Python, you need to write libraries in other languages and provide a Phython interface. This is what scipy does, and it is a very good job, but it does not feel "natural" from the point of view of the language. If Python was a good scientific programming language, the most natural way to implement scipy/numpy and all that would be using Python itself, but this is not at all the case.
EDIT: I'm always very surprised by the wide acceptance of python/numpy for numerical algorithms, as it seems a notion quite foreign and awkward for this language. Python has excellent native support for string processing and advanced data structures like dictionaries, but those are mostly useless for numerical computation. If you want to do math in Python, you need to write libraries in other languages and provide a Phython interface. This is what scipy does, and it is a very good job, but it does not feel "natural" from the point of view of the language. If Python was a good scientific programming language, the most natural way to implement scipy/numpy and all that would be using Python itself, but this is not at all the case.