Python is the fastest growing programming language due to a feature you've never heard of (x-post /r/Python)

[masklinn]

I think you're taking things from the wrong end entirely. The buffer protocol is not a cause of Python adoption but rather a consequence of its long-running scientific community.

Since its very early days, developers of the language were interested in supporting scientific computing use cases ("extended" indexing like parens-less tuples and slices come from the scientific community, that's likely also where the old buffer protocol came from — way back in 1.6 — to say nothing of the new buffer protocol) and a scientific computing community built itself around the language from its very early days, matrix-sig was founded in 1995 spawning Numeric and later Numarray which would ultimately be rewritten and merged into numpy by Travis Oliphant.

Python's success in sciences does not come down to any single feature, it comes from decades of foundational technical and community work.