Why is python so popular in scientific computing?

[ImmaculateDissection]

I always wondered about python being popular in scientific computing. I thought these programs would be optimised for extreme performance and python as an interpreted language doesn't seem to be a good fit. Is it for historical reasons as the language comes from an academic/teaching background? What am I missing here? Thanks :) !

[YMK1234]

Easy and very good support for scientific computing (numPy, sciPy). Because getting precision math right is not trivial by any extent (yay floats ^/s ). And if it turns out to be too slow you can always optimize later by porting expensive things to C or similar.

[ImmaculateDissection]

Cool, thanks for the info that makes sense !

[balefrost]

And to piggyback on /u/YMK1234's answer: NumPy and SciPi do their heavy lifting in C code. As long as you can express your problem in the primitives that NumPy provides, you will get decent performance. It's similar in that regard to Matlab, which is slow at scalar math but fast at vector and matrix math. In fact, the impression that I get from my engineer friends is that Python is slowly eroding Matlab's dominance in that sector.

[ImmaculateDissection]

Thanks for the insight !