I find the dramatic rise of Python (and open source tools in general) for scientific work interesting and cool. When I first started using Python many years ago

I find the dramatic rise of Python (and open source tools in general) for scientific work interesting and cool. When I first started using Python many years ago, I was doing contract work for the SciPy/NumPy folks (Enthought), and Python was still a blip in the scientific world...Java and Fortran and a bit of C++ ruled the commercial world, with Mathematica and MatLab handling the academic side of things (with some overlap and some outliers). It's really cool to see. I like seeing science democratized, and Python is definitely a democratizing influence, and the fact that so much of it is open source is really fantastic. I've also noticed that a lot more domain experts are becoming programmer+domain experts through this evolution. It used to be that there were teams with a scientist to design it and one or more programmers to implement it, and that's becoming less of a requirement, which can accelerate the science-ing to a notable degree.