Fortran interop (f2py in particular) was a significant factor, and as soon as you get one thing (in this case LAPACK and BLAS bindings) it snowballs. Also, Pyth

Fortran interop (f2py in particular) was a significant factor, and as soon as you get one thing (in this case LAPACK and BLAS bindings) it snowballs. Also, Python is significantly more initially familiar for informal programmers and that’s critical; the hard part of learning a language is often believing that you can -and Ruby looks weirder than Python, so it makes people doubt themselves.