Ask HN: Why did Python win?

This is part of it, but the reasons go back further. As others have mentioned, Python is a pretty old language. It debuted as "Python" in 1991 even before Linux was out, and it existed as ABC even in the late 80s. It had a very good, easy to use C API early on. Combining that with the way it can load shared object files as modules and the ability to create user-defined operators and effectively extend the default syntax allowed it to mimic both MATLAB with SciPy and Numpy and R's data.frame with pandas, which is a huge part of why it attracted all the people from scientific computing and data analytics. The API to the major packages was nearly identical to what they were already familiar with from before. It's not an array language on its own, but the ability redefine operators and the fact that array indexing is itself an operator made it possible to turn it into an array language. The fact that all of these packages can easily just wrap existing BLAS and LAPACK implementations made it very fast for these purposes, too.

That also happened pretty early. Numpy came out in the 90s. But even before that, Python and Perl were about the only two scripting languages other than the shell that was guaranteed to be present on a GNU/Linux system from the start. That made it really popular to create high-level system utilities in Python. A whole lot of the util-linux packages, libvirt, the apt packaging system, all make heavy use of Python. So it's not just the academics already familiar with it, but system administrators and hackers, too.

It also gained widespread popularity as a teaching language alternative to Java. Once MIT started using it in their intro to programming course and put that on the Internet via OCW, it really took off as many people's first exposure to programming.

The batteries included approach to the standard library makes it very usable for one-off automation tasks, too. I don't even like Python that much, but the other day I was doing some math work and just needed to compute a bunch of binomials and enumerate subset combinations. You want to look up how to do that in your language of choice? Python just has math.factorial and itertools.combinations in the standard library. If you're using Linux or Mac, you already have it. It may not be a great choice for application development, but if you need to do some quick, interactive tasks that are never going to get deployed or even necessarily stored on disk as files but just run once from the repl, and it's too much for your calculator app or Excel to handle, Python is perfect.

If you want to really experience the true horror of implicit try Scala.

Lots of other people have commented on why Python won in general. I can say why Python was a better choice for me personally, in 1997 or so...

I was using Perl a lot to manage an multi-thousand page external site, and a much larger internal site for a major division of a large aerospace/engineering company. These ware all scripts to run on the filesystem to do things like change the company name across thousands of pages, where the historical would be kept for past events, but the new company name would be used for current projects.

I sort of semi-nepotisticaly lucked into the job-- I was doing desktop publishing previously, and one of the managers at the division was a relative of my girlfriend. There also were very few webmasters around, and I had a lot of experience with graphics and the software around it.So I taught myself HTML, some basic programming, and was off to the races. But I was basically a just "computer person", but not much of a programmer.

Doing anything by hand on a site that big was just not going to happen, and Perl had a bunch of great pre-made scripts available for doing lots of stuff, but it was murder trying to modify any of them. It was clear that Perl just was too much work to learn, and the "one way" philosophy of early Python made the documentation easier, examples more consistent, etc...

But Python was much more approachable. It was also pretty clear that it had a better future, and had a pretty good (not great) set of libraries available, pretty good regular expressions, and really good integration with just about anything on Windows 95 (via an external COM library). When I started I didn't realize how the ability to script I.E., or Excel, or whatever was a really powerful tool that saved me countless hours. For example, of of the Marketing execs wanted to review every web page, but didn't want to use a browser, so via Python's COM tools, I could script IE to open, log, and print every page. When something failed (e.g. printer ran out of paper) I could use the log to restart wherever I needed. I could also grab a bunch of data from an Excel workflow some engineer had cooked up and dump all the data into a database, so they could use the tools that were comfortable for them, and still centralize it enough to generate dashboards or reports or whatever for management.

The performance wasn't that great, but computers were getting better, faster, all the time, and programmer productivity was starting to become much more of a concern.

I run into this problem as well I'll often come across something I wrote a few years ago and struggle to remember why I wrote it that way.

I've learned to add comments to my code - from what I see commenting code is frowned upon by a certain subset of developers but I've taught myself that whenever I am doing something subtle or unintuitive to add a short comment explaining what the code is doing, for every potentially unnecessary comment I've added I've also saved myself time when I've had to come back to something months or years later and been able to refer back to the comment.

Some times there's a reason, some times it's just luck.

While I appreciate we love to try and explain the present as an inevitable destination, some times it's just the way the dice rolled on this iteration of the simulation.