Luck no, path-dependency yes. Numpy is fantastic and so is scipy, but there's no inherent reason why they couldn't have been "numruby" or "numlua". With that

Luck no, path-dependency yes. Numpy is fantastic and so is scipy, but there's no inherent reason why they couldn't have been "numruby" or "numlua". With that said, I agree with you that your parent's thesis isn't really operative, Python and Ruby are almost exactly the same technology, therefore the decision on which one to use depends on the available ecosystem. Everything else is effectively rounding error.