As someone who does data science, I roll my eyes every time I have to touch Python. It’s ubiquitous, but it actually sucks once you get used to better languages.
It is somewhat circular: it was preferred because your earlier alternatives were Java or C(++) both of which had their shortcomings. SKLearn is still one of the most feature-complete and powerful libraries and it was Python only and thus drew a crowd.
A lot of people who write data science code, I would be confident to bet that if you taught them Julia first, they’d prefer that.
It is somewhat circular: it was preferred because your earlier alternatives were Java or C(++) both of which had their shortcomings. SKLearn is still one of the most feature-complete and powerful libraries and it was Python only and thus drew a crowd. A lot of people who write data science code, I would be confident to bet that if you taught them Julia first, they’d prefer that.