Ehm, Python is not a "scripting language". It is a — as you said — general purpose programming language. And it is becoming more and more popular for scientific applications, where matrix multiplication plays a key role.
Just for the record, these are the characteristics of Python that made me call it "scripting":
- Interpreted
- Highly expressive
- No boilerplate
- Vast majority of programs are short
- Lots of libraries for gluing stuff together
- Used for turing-complete customization of software in other languages (e.g.: Sublime Text)
- Recommended as replacement for Bash in some cases
Anyway, I'm happy to see the language evolving to meet its users' needs.
It can be used as a scripting language, but that doesn't seem to be the main use-case anymore.
> Indeed, and because it doesn't support closures, it's not a true functional programming language either. And because you have to import all sorts of modules to do the simplest things (e.g., regular expressions), neither is it a true scripting language. Indeed, because it doesn't support labeled break or continue statements, it's not even a true structured programming language.
I think the point is, trying to classify programming languages (except domain specific ones like SQL or maybe PHP) is kind of pointless.
But to answer your real question, Python is one of the top languages in number crunching. After web work, that's Python's second biggest niche.
It does now, and thank goodness, because even C++ has closures these days.