Numpy is kind of a funky library with some weird (but good!) syntactic sugar that doesn't translate to the rest of Python. Scipy is a different beast. And pandas. I could go on. Making, and using matrices, feels weird in python and interoperability/efficiency doesn't come for free.

Compare to matlab, where matrices are first-class, syntactic sugar is consistent and rather lovely. But then the rest of the language is detestable.