Comment by pjmlp

Using Python as C and C++ REPL of sorts has been common in academia since it took the scripting crown away from Perl and Tcl, which were used during the late 90's.

Example see the Bioinformatics papers from that period, and the Perl tooling used alongside the research.

Already in 2003 CERN was using Python on some of their build infrastructure (see CMT), Grid Computing scripting efforts, and we had Python trainings available to us.

Now there is a difference between a REPL of sorts, scripting OS tasks, and going full blown applications with a pure interpreter.