Arguably, that's good design, at least in terms of actual success. Where is Ruby relative to Python? "Dumbed down" means good pedagogical language--it's alway

Arguably, that's good design, at least in terms of actual success. Where is Ruby relative to Python? "Dumbed down" means good pedagogical language--it's always had an advantage there as well in scientific computing. And the strength of its design is seen in the fact that it's still used by very experienced/advanced users. Also, it wasn't a first mover in scientific computing--Matlab and Maple were around long before numpy. Matlab dates from the early 80s; numpy from 2005. Python has stolen a lot of mindshare from Matlab with numpy and scipy and Jupyter. Even today I help PhDs switch from Matlab to scipy. Personally, I've always liked the ethic of Python that there's only one way to to do it, normally. It means the boilerplate code looks the same everywhere, and when you break the "rules" of that one way, you do it with a reason, a conscious justification, rather than as a stylistic flourish or an idiosyncratic preference.