Yeah I don't disagree re: scientific computing and Python (although I think from the beginning some of the advocacy for Python was coming from more "math-orient

Yeah I don't disagree re: scientific computing and Python (although I think from the beginning some of the advocacy for Python was coming from more "math-oriented" communities). I still think that when it started accelerating in use (which was mainly among scripting and then web applications, some other stuff too) there were existing solutions. A lot of discussions about established languages versus new ones are very similar to one another; the particular languages are just swapped out for different ones.