[blunte]

Because a lot of the early development in these areas was done by mathematicians and physicists who weren’t programmers (and who had less exposure to languages). These are folks who just wanted an answer to a question or a premise, and the elegance of the path that took them to the answer was utterly insignificant.

In some cases you might see a 3000 line python script with no defined functions… just loops and conditionals and lots of copy-pasted code with small variations in each section.

It’s really a shame, since there are so many more elegant languages which are equally or more powerful. But python is not a terrible language… it’s just an everyman get-shit-done language. We could be worse off.