[7thaccount]

Same. Obviously a OO scripting language by itself isn't fast enough for most scientific coding, but when the C/Fortran libraries are tightly integrated with lots of stats/plots and other libraries with great IDE/database...etc it makes for a great and free/open scientific modeling platform. It's really the whole package and the language is just 1 component of that.

[analog31]

Indeed, and it's my understanding that supporting that kind of integration is a strength of Python. Since I use Python in the lab, I've also found that the whole ctypes thing is a life saver when dealing with hardware drivers that are only furnished with a C API.