As a physicist, having spent eight years in academia, Python did not win by beating Fortran. Nor did it beat C++. It didn't really compete with Ruby or Lisp, although Lua (Torch) was a briefly serious competitor before everyone realized that a language developed by four people, one of whom doesn't get along with the others, couldn't be responsive to users' needs.
Python defeated Matlab. I know because I cheered it on. I was there. I watched my roommates and friends struggle with introductory scientific computing in Matlab and I joined the chorus that was practically begging for Python, even though I didn't really like it. I can't even begin to explain how awful it is to try to teach programming concepts in Matlab. But something like Python or Matlab had to be the choice because the schools wanted to teach programming through a language where you could just call "graph" and the computer would display a graph.
Python's team, unlike Lua's, aggressively courted educational institutions by offering scientific, numerical and graphical libraries within a programming language that works like a programming language, not a glorified computer algebra system. They even added a dedicated operator for matrix multiplication. It's a great example of finding a niche and filling it: I still don't like using Python, but I can't dispute that no other language/ecosystem comes close to offering what we need to teach programming to physics students.
You want to beat Python? Build a type system that can capture dimensional analysis. Warning: it won't be easy.
Python defeated Matlab. I know because I cheered it on. I was there. I watched my roommates and friends struggle with introductory scientific computing in Matlab and I joined the chorus that was practically begging for Python, even though I didn't really like it. I can't even begin to explain how awful it is to try to teach programming concepts in Matlab. But something like Python or Matlab had to be the choice because the schools wanted to teach programming through a language where you could just call "graph" and the computer would display a graph.
Python's team, unlike Lua's, aggressively courted educational institutions by offering scientific, numerical and graphical libraries within a programming language that works like a programming language, not a glorified computer algebra system. They even added a dedicated operator for matrix multiplication. It's a great example of finding a niche and filling it: I still don't like using Python, but I can't dispute that no other language/ecosystem comes close to offering what we need to teach programming to physics students.
You want to beat Python? Build a type system that can capture dimensional analysis. Warning: it won't be easy.