I went to college starting 2007 (right when CUDA was released) and recall a few things about python that made it attractive in both the comp sci and math depart

I went to college starting 2007 (right when CUDA was released) and recall a few things about python that made it attractive in both the comp sci and math departments at my school. - python integrated well with lesson plans instructors had - python integrated well with the software math departments were using (like MATLAB) - python had a very easy to use interpreter environment that worked well on linux, mac, and windows - python had (for the era) a massive standard library, making it way easier to consume and process common data file formats like XML or CSV without having to install any extensions (installing extensions usually required admin permissions and... very few at school had those for very good reasons) - exposing c/fortran libraries into python was pretty straightforward to do and was relatively stable compared to alternatives. Around 2007, the main competitors in the scripting space had a lot of issues: - tcl - somewhat popular for embedding but didn't really have a standalone interpreter that made it easy to interact with and the syntax didn't really look like C, and really not much of a library to work with - lua - similar to tcl, popular for embedding but didn't have a popular standalone runtime and interpreter. syntax was closer to C though. didn't have much of a library to work with - ruby - had a runtime for experimenting but a less stable API for integrating, plus the language was pretty different from C. the library was large but had a larger reliance on installing extensions than python at the time. - perl - both unstable and had a horrible reputation by this point as a standalone language that outside of some obtuse systems scripting, most people didn't want to touch this with a 12-foot pole. standard library was small and relied a lot on extensions. - php - similarly unstable (at the time... i think 5.3 had just come out) and had a horrible reputation... also not even sure it had a runtime that worked outside of an apache/nginx context... exposing a c library to PHP at this time was pretty straightforward though. relied very heavily on extensions at this point. - javascript - node.js hadn't come out at this point... so the idea of running javascript outside of a browser window wasn't really a thing yet. If one were looking to expose CUDA to programmers who didn't want to work in C during this era, I'd argue that python was just the best option at the time. I believe that led to a first-mover advantage that has held over time.