Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy by Bruce Berriman.
From the post:
The rapid adoption of Python by the astronomical community was starting to make it a victim of its own success, with fragmented development of Python packages across different groups. Thus began the Astropy project began in 2011, with an ambitious goal to coordinate Python development across various groups and simplify installation and usage for astronomers. These ambitious goals have been met and are summarized in the paper Astropy: A Community Python Package for Astronomy, prepared by the Astropy Collaboration. The Astropy webpage provides download and build instructions for the current release, version 0.2.4, and complete documentation. It is released under a “3-clause” BSD-type license – the package may be used for any purpose, as long as the copyright is acknowledged and warranty disclaimers are given.
Get the paper and the code. Both will repay your study well.
The only good Python story I know was from a programmer who lamented the ability of Python to scale.
He wrote a sample program in Python for a customer, anticipating they would return for the production version.
But the sample program handled their needs so well, they had no need for the production version.
I am sure Python was due some of the credit but the programmer is a James Clark level programmer so his skills contributed to the result as well.