I'd reckon the parent's suspicion about the scientific community is correct in that it was a large influence. When ML and deep learning blew up, the academic Python community was in a great position -- you had numpy and scipy early on (both optionally BLAS and LAPACK btw), then scikit-learn for ML, matplotlib for plotting results, open CV ports, etc. As for why Python was adopted so early by the scientific community, I'm not sure. Maybe because it was a scripting language that was also very friendly for hooking to C and Fortran?
I'd reckon the parent's suspicion about the scientific community is correct in that it was a large influence. When ML and deep learning blew up, the academic Python community was in a great position -- you had numpy and scipy early on (both optionally BLAS and LAPACK btw), then scikit-learn for ML, matplotlib for plotting results, open CV ports, etc. As for why Python was adopted so early by the scientific community, I'm not sure. Maybe because it was a scripting language that was also very friendly for hooking to C and Fortran?