>>Python has a lot of great libraries. [...] But there should be a capstone level class for data/ai scientists before they can graduate which shows other languages
I didn't downvote your gp reply but your answer just pushes the question to an earlier point. Why did early earlier 1995 programmers at science labs like David Beazley and Jim Hugunin (who already knew "other languages" such as C Language, assembly, Fortran, etc) ... choose Python as the scripting wrapper for their C code? See my other comment about their earlier history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30813528
The "Python having a lot of great libraries" wouldn't have been a compelling reason for David Beazley since those earlier creators of scientific packages for Python chose Python before it had a lot of scientific libs. They were among the very first.
Here are some bullets from another deep link at a different point in the video[1] :
- David's first attempt writing his own homegrown scripting language.
- he also looked at alternatives like Tcl/Tk and Perl and they weren't as appealing as Python.
- David mentioned Python had a more powerful REPL.
- Python was also open source C code so he could easily modify it to run on the Thinking Machines CM-5 computer[2] in the physics lab
- wanted a language & runtime that encouraged the wider community to build more science tools
In your opinion, what was the superior programming language that David Beazley and Jim Hugunin should have chosen in 1995 that checks all the bullet points above?