Intellectuelen, part 1

SciPy’s arrival at this point is surprising and somewhat anomalous. When started in 2001, the library had little funding and was written mainly by graduate students—many of them without a computer science education and often without the blessing of their advisors. To even imagine that a small group of ‘rogue’ student programmers could upend the already well-established ecosystem of research software—backed by millions in funding and many hundreds of highly qualified engineers^10,11,12—was preposterous.