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Re:Welcome to the Python Engineering blog by fencepost on Sunday February 21, 2016 @05:41PM (#11147001)
Since the data science folks don't also have a goal of becoming programmers, a language that had some early design goals of being easy to teach (see also CP4E [0]) and has appropriate "good enough" libraries lets them build custom analysis software without having to spend nearly as much time learning programming instead of more relevant things.

Also, inertia:

  * Python, 1991
  * Lua, 1993
  * Ruby, 1995 (Japan) 1999 (English)
  * Clojure, 2009
[0] https://www.python.org/doc/essays/cp4e/
Re:Welcome to the Python Engineering blog by afarrell on Monday February 22, 2016 @01:14AM (#11148906)
The early design goal of being easy to teach also caused python to have a culture that places a high value on doing the work to make the developer experience better for beginners. You can see this in things like the Django tutorial, but it is more powerfully felt as an undercurrent in conversations at python conferences (based on PyTennessee, PyConUK, DjangoCon, and PyCaribbean)