[jrochkind1]

I think it's clear numpy is a huge part of it.

But that begs the question -- why did numpy develop in python and not ruby?

The rest of the thread offers some suggestions though. One is simply that python was born first, and got the numpy precursor before ruby 1.0 even happened. Which seems like a thing.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Ruby had a numpy style library since the early 00's, I forget exactly when. But it never got the kind of momentum numpy and the Python ecosystem surrounding it did.

Lots of comments in this thread from people who's Ruby experience is only from the post Rails era after ~2008, and don't understand that the post Rails culture wasn't really a thing when Python was first gaining momentum for scientific computing.

[cutler]

You're forgetting that Python was designed by a mathematician looking to replace ABC.