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SciPy, NumPy, Matplotlib, Cython, Sphinx, PIL. The article should've also mentioned NLTK.

IMHO, languages matter less than the available libraries, and in my experience only Java matches the depth of the Python ecosystem.

That Python is a nice language to work with, that's just a bonus.

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I agree about Python's libraries. Normally, I'm a Ruby programmer, because I like Ruby's syntax and the Rack/Rails/Sinatra web stack.

But if I need to do scientific or linguistic programming, Python is absolutely amazing. SciPy, NumPy, Matplotlib and NLTK support a rich and deep ecosystem. And it's vastly nicer programming environment than Matlab and Octave.

(Of course, GNU R is also pretty useful if you're doing pure statistics.)

Which is why we use Python. We're a web app (Django) doing big data aggregation/processing (Numpy).

Same here. I used to do a lot of Python programming, but moved to Ruby because of Rails. When I had to work on a machine learning paper, I spent weeks looking for a equivalent to NumPy or Matplotlib in the Ruby world, but nothing comes even close!

Also, (basic) GPU operations with cudamat (or even finer, gnumpy) at your fingertips.

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