# SciPy

12 Hacker News commenters recommended SciPy and 2 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Recommended as a core numerical and scientific library in Python, often alongside NumPy and pandas, for heavy computation and turning equations into code.

## Why people recommend it

- Core of the Python science stack (9 comments): "Third party libraries like SciPy scikit-learn, pandas, tensorflow and pytorch have been critical to python's success" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47295489)) "Pandas and Matplotlib and SciPy all used via an ipython notebook were almost a replacement" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46173034)) "NumPy, SciPy, and pandas gave them a decent glue layer over C and Fortran" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553594))
- Works well with NumPy (5 comments): "NumPy, SciPy, and pandas gave them a decent glue layer over C and Fortran" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47553594)) "I already consider SciPy and NumPy to be best practice in this area" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48236757)) "Write it in Python with numpy/scipy doing the heavy lifting" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380816))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Polars](https://hackerapproved.com/p/polars.md): 152 recommend
- [pandas](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pandas.md): 93 recommend
- [NumPy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/numpy.md): 86 recommend
- [sh Python library](https://hackerapproved.com/p/sh.md): 10 recommend
- [Tacopy](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tacopy.md): 8 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "SciPy", https://hackerapproved.com/p/scipy/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).