I think the secret is that python is so slow that you have to vectorize and call a library written in C to do any serious math. In 2008 this was a serious downside, but it meant that a whole community got used to slicing, multi-indexing, specialized functions like cumsum, and shared idioms. As a result, when the GPGPU revolution hit, you could write vectorized gpu code in any language, but the shared idioms meant that python programmers had the unique superpower of being able to read each others vectorized gpu code.