I think that a lot of 'number crunching' scientific programs that evolved in the 1990's were written in Matlab. Most of them in the 1980's and earlier where in

I think that a lot of 'number crunching' scientific programs that evolved in the 1990's were written in Matlab. Most of them in the 1980's and earlier where in FORTRAN77. Where the comparison to python really gets interesting is the addition of the REPL, the (now mature) NumPy/SciPy libraries, tkinter (python Tk libraries), and a bunch of other common things that are causing many established scientists and engineers to ditch their Matlab licenses and move towards python. This is more geared at the analyst level, which you could compare astronomers to, rather than the scientific programmer level (who have been writing C or C++ in the 1990s/2000s instead of Matlab). Python makes things neat because the same libraries (mentioned in the article) that the scientific programmers are using can now be used directly by the analysts/astronomers.