Gaël Varoquaux - Scientist meets web dev: how Python became the language of data Data science is a hot topic and Python has emerged as an ideal language for it. Its strength for data analysis come from the cultural mix between the scientific Python community, and more conventional software usage, such as web development or system administration. I'll show how and why Python is a easy and powerful tool for data science. ----- Python started as a scripting language, but now it is the new trend everywhere and in particular for data science, the latest rage of computing. It didn't get there by chance: tools and concepts built by nerdy scientists and geek sysadmins provide foundations for what is said to be the sexiest job: data scientist. In my talk I'll give a personal perspective, historical and technical, on the progress of the scientific Python ecosystem, from numerical physics to data mining. What made Python suitable for science; How could scipy grow to challenge commercial giants such as Matlab; Why the cultural gap between scientific Python and the broader Python community turned out to be a gold mine; How scikit-learn was born, what technical decisions enabled it to grow; And last but not least, how we are addressing a wider and wider public, lowering the bar and empowering people. The talk will discuss low-level technical aspects, such as how the Python world makes it easy to move large chunks of number across code. It will touch upon current exciting developments in scikit-learn and joblib. But it will also talk about softer topics, such as project dynamics or documentation, as software's success is determined by people.