This is false. It was mostly designed as a tool for Unix hackers, with motivations that seem not too dissimilar from perl. It was the ease of use of the languag

This is false. It was mostly designed as a tool for Unix hackers, with motivations that seem not too dissimilar from perl. It was the ease of use of the language that brought people in from the math/science community who usually weren't programmers. This has often historically led to terrible and non-idiomatic (but working) code, because if you have an idea in your head you can quickly hit the ground running.