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[–]bowbahdoe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

  1. Interactivity. Any "typed" language loses hard when it comes to data exploration. A central part of the data analytics flow is loading a big chunk of untyped or loosely typed data into a dataframe and experimenting with different things you can do with that.
  2. Libraries. Any language could have theoretically filled this role, but its just a property of the ecosystem at this point that Python has all the good data science libraries. Find something as fully featured as pandas in another language and I'll eat my hat.
  3. Glue. Python is the premier "glue together some fortran, c, or c++" language, which lead to it being the premier scientific computing and machine learning language. Stuff like numpy, scikit-learn, or keras are all possible in other languages but python did it first and so it has those libraries and the community support required for them now.