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Re:Welcome to the Python Engineering blog by melling on Sunday February 21, 2016 @03:37PM (#11146373)
Are there specific data science libraries or are we talking about the large number of libraries in general?
Re:Welcome to the Python Engineering blog by anton_gogolev on Sunday February 21, 2016 @03:39PM (#11146391)
NumPy and SciPy are the ones that I know of (and I don't even write Python, so there is surely more).
Re:Welcome to the Python Engineering blog by masklinn on Sunday February 21, 2016 @03:48PM (#11146437)
numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, matplotlib, pandas, biopython, sage, ipython and ipython notebook — now jupyter — (with both matplotlib and clusters management integrations), non-C accelerators (numba, cython), anaconda (a science and engineering semi-proprietary bundling & package manager).

Many of these have their roots in the late 90s or early 00s. I guess Python got its fangs (haha) into scientific computing at the turn of the century, from the late 90s you find articles mentioning the introduction of scripting languages as glue in scientific pipelines variously mentioning Perl, Python and Tcl, and by and large it seems to have slowly accreted around Python.

Re:Welcome to the Python Engineering blog by MengerSponge on Sunday February 21, 2016 @04:01PM (#11146499)
Some of the Numpy and Scipy routines go back earlier than the 90's. AFAIK, they trace their roots to numeric routines on Fortran punch cards.
Re:Welcome to the Python Engineering blog by masklinn on Sunday February 21, 2016 @04:05PM (#11146523)
> AFAIK, they trace their roots to numeric routines on Fortran punch cards.

Oh yes they can bind to much older libraries (e.g. BLAS), I was talking about the packages themselves. For instance Numpy is the unification of Numeric and Numarray, the former having gotten started circa 1995[0] on matrix-sig[1] and the latter originally indented to replace the former. So numpy itself has its roots in 1995.

[0] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/matrix-sig/1995-August/000...

[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/matrix-sig/

There are gems in these early messages too, for instance one of the early threads suggested allowing parens-less tuples and slice literals (a:b) in tuples within indexing: https://mail.python.org/pipermail/matrix-sig/1995-September/...

Slice literals, let alone slice literals in tuples, remain indexing-only features to this day.

So the language has a long history of adapting itself to numerical computing concerns.