It's addressed in the PEP, even with some convincing empirical data. Python is becoming hugely popular as a scientific data processing language. This paragraph

It's addressed in the PEP, even with some convincing empirical data. Python is becoming hugely popular as a scientific data processing language. This paragraph from the motivation summarizes: "We all live in our own little sub-communities, so some Python users may be surprised to realize the sheer extent to which Python is used for number crunching -- especially since much of this particular sub-community's activity occurs outside of traditional Python/FOSS channels. So, to give some rough idea of just how many numerical Python programmers are actually out there, here are two numbers: In 2013, there were 7 international conferences organized specifically on numerical Python [3] [4]. At PyCon 2014, ~20% of the tutorials appear to involve the use of matrices [6]."