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.