I have the feeling that its user base is pretty lopsided, but I might underestimate its importance in other areas, like teaching programming. I'd love to see a breakdown of its popularity by field.
That’s tail wagging the dog. ‘Why Python became the scientific computing language?’ is the right question.
Some guesses:
- Because scientists aren't that much into programming and Python is one of the easier languages to start with?
- Some aspects of its language design, like the syntax for slices, making it easy to express often used operations in a rather intuitive way?
- The two points above leading to the numpy project, enabling high-volume computations with a friendly programming language?
- Maybe Jupyter Notebooks played a role as well? It's a great teaching tool.
Facebook + Instagram (largest deployment of Django)
Spotify (millions of lines of Python)
Netflix
Dropbox (millions of lines of Python)
YouTube
Plenty more examples.
How is this an answer to the question?
... do I really need to explain this?
P used for something in places in parallel of hundreds of (several exotic, rarely used) technologies is not really predicting how much P was used without scientific and ML uses. What if P is mostly used for scientific and ML purposes in those places, or as an experiment, study, not necessarily being a backbone? Or with other secondary agenda, overstated, etc. The mere fact that P is used in a huge amalgam of A,B,C,... tells very little alone concerning the question. Almost nothing.
Yes, needs some unwrapping what you believe.
I would argue moving away from Python at global scale doesn't even negate my point. All products change with scale.
Instagram (Cinder), Google (Unladen Swallow) and Dropbox (Pyston) have also all experimented with heavy engineering investment trying to improve Python performance and only one of them (Cinder) has outcompeted the “just rewrite it in a faster language” strategy.