Guido van Rossum

And so those poor scientists were required to use, say, Fortran, because Fortran was the language that the library was written in.

And then the scientist would have to write an application that sort of uses the library to solve a particular equation or set of problems.

of answer a set of questions and the same for C++ because there's interoperability.

So the dusty decks are written either in C++ or Fortran.

And so Paul Dubois was one of the people who I think in the mid 90s saw that you needed a higher level language for the scientists

And so...

Gradually, some libraries started appearing that did very fundamental stuff with arrays of numbers in Python.

I mean, when I first created Python, I was not expecting it to be used for arrays of numbers much.

I thought that was like an outdated data type.

And everything was like objects and strings.

And Python was good and fast at string manipulation and objects, obviously.

But arrays of numbers were not very efficient.

And the multidimensional arrays didn't even exist in the language at all.

But there were people who realized that Python had extensibility.

that was flexible enough that they could write third-party packages that did support large arrays of numbers and operations on them very efficiently.

And somehow they got a foothold through sort of different parts of the scientific community.

I remember that the Hubble Space Telescope people in Baltimore were somehow big Python fans in the late 90s.

And at various points, small improvements were made and more people got in touch with using Python to derive these libraries better.

of interesting algorithms.

And like once you have a bunch of scientists who are working on similar problems, say they're all working on stuff that comes in from the Hubble Space Telescope, but they're looking at different things.