Python got numpy fairly early on. It is fast and powerful. Then a whole ecosystem was built on top of numpy, with scipy, pandas, PIL, et cetera. Everything tha

Python got numpy fairly early on. It is fast and powerful. Then a whole ecosystem was built on top of numpy, with scipy, pandas, PIL, et cetera. Everything that uses n-dimensional arrays used numpy as their base and as a result all those things can be combined trivially. That's very powerful. Then later came ipython, a much improved interactive shell, and Web based notebooks that are very useful for data science work. That the language involved is Python isn't even important, imo. Numpy + ecosystem replaced Matlab. All Python has to be is be a better language than Matlab, and it is.