Yeah it was a success 20 years in the making, had a fair amount of input from science men and that being GvR’s background he responded positively e.g. the extended slices (striding) and ability to index with an unparenthesised tuple (multidimensional indexing) were very much added for the convenience of numpy’s ancestors.

I would not say it had no competition, Perl used to be quite popular in at least some sci-comp fields (I want to say bioinformatics but I’m probably wrong).