[msla]

The reason C is so popular is because it's the scripting language of Unix. C++ is the scripting language of Windows. Objective-C, Macs and iOS.

Well, Python is the scripting language of a ton of useful libraries which are relevant to a lot of very interesting fields.

R sits in a similar spot, but Python is a better, friendlier language, which means actual programmers are more apt to recommend it as an offhand solution to a simple problem someone who isn't seen as a programmer is having: "Oh, that's easy. Just copy and paste this Python code, and maybe hack at it until it does something." You can get scientists programming with recommendations like that.

[SimbaOnSteroids]

"It's psuedo-code that works"

[lou1306]

This. I took the habit of writing very Python-like pseudocode while taking lecture notes, and having it run almost verbatim at home was a blast.

[SimbaOnSteroids]

Honestly if other languages had the ability to use words like and, or, not, foreach <thing> in <thing> it would make learning to code that much more accessible. Even a language like C could do this. I understand that obviously you're not going to change something like a bit-wise (>>/<<) operator into something that flat says what it does (drop bit right/left), and I appreciate a good use of a ternary operator, you'd think it would be fairly trivial to de-codify some of the more basic operations.

[gaius]

Python has super-easy bindings to C too, that's another reason it's popular in scientific computing

[msla]

And because it has bindings to C, it has bindings to a lot of other languages traditionally compiled to machine language, such as Fortran and C++, making SciPy possible, because that optionally depends on LAPACK, which is written in Fortran.

https://www.scipy.org/scipylib/building/linux.html

Of course, the people who just install and run SciPy don't need to know that, but the fact Python has a nice C FFI means it can run literally decades' worth of software across a fair number of languages.