Before numpy became the standard there was Numeric and Numarray, with painful rewrites for whoever had committed to those. And there was Scientific Python build

Before numpy became the standard there was Numeric and Numarray, with painful rewrites for whoever had committed to those. And there was Scientific Python building upon those (I think it started using Numeric, then later on was ported on top of numpy), similar to scipy, but that is more or less dead nowadays. And before matplotlib became the standard, there was a bunch of older plotting libs; I recall using something that was a wrapper around gnuplot, IIRC. So I think it all mostly has to do with the fact that Julia is much newer and many even foundational areas are still in a state of flux. In a few decades the dust will have mostly settled. Of course, in the areas where people are pushing the envelope, it's good that a lot of approaches are tried out before the world settles on a winner.