Python was the first programming language whose primary focus was not scientific applications, i.e. not MATLAB,Fortran or R, to have support for numeric arrays

Python was the first programming language whose primary focus was not scientific applications, i.e. not MATLAB,Fortran or R, to have support for numeric arrays (matrices) via ndarray and then Numpy, while still being fairly approachable for the scientific community. If Travis Oliphant had picked Ruby for implementing ndarray, maybe would be the defacto language for data science.