[karmasimida]

Python was already the lingua franca before the whole deep learning/AI thing. It has numpy/scipy/pandas/scikit-learn, etc. And when did numpy happen? It was in 1996.

Arguably its biggest competitor then was R, but R is not well accepted by programmers. Yet another alternative is Matlab, but OMG, using matlab for anything string related is killing me.

While there is some history to it, Python won in the end isn't a surprise to anyone. It is simple but not toyish for real world system. I am working in one of the big techs, and Python is running the production workload for most AI services just fine.

I took a LOT of issue with dynamic typing, but for ML/AL you are going to write a lot ad-hoc data wrangling code, sometimes even Python feels verbose.

TL;DR: It had already won.

[aasasd]

Yup, it was already everywhere before ‘data science’ was a thing. Turns out, people in actual fundamental science want to slap calculations together fast instead of fussing with memory and whatnot.

I have a friend who writes C or C++ (can't remember which) for clusters processing data from particle accelerators, but he will still reach for Python when he wants anything simpler than that—and, I guess, less interactive than Matlab.