Ask HN: Why did Python win?

My memory is that, at least outside of the web/RoR world, Ruby at no point as popular in the US as Python. Lets take, say 2005 as a point that Ruby was really gaining popularity due to Rails: at this point I was already seeing internal tools that previously would have been written in Perl being written in Python.

Python just seems to have maintained a certain momentum, and I'm not sure why, but if I had to guess:

1. The syntax is almost a dead-ringer for pseudo code. The first time I encountered Python, I fixed a bug in an open-source project having never seen Python before. I recall two different CS programs switched to Python from Scheme for exactly this reason.

2. It was designed to glue C together. Other languages were too (TCL and Lua; Perl primarily interfaced with the outside world in the same way shell does, with pipes).

3. A kitchen-sink approach to the standard library helped it a lot for the first 20 years of its existence. CPAN was sui-generis at the time for installing libraries, so the more you could do without relying on 3rd-party libraries, better off you were.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggdrop

But I'll add Ruby on Rails and a lessor extent Ruby was pushed by hipsters hard and people who didn't program but were internet explorers.

Python just was. You'd never have not considered it a language.

I always thought having Python 2 and 3 held it back a decade. The fact it won despite that means to me it was never a contest.

The main thing that has led to the decline of Rails is the rise of no-HTML-just-an-API backends. Your web frontend development stack is more likely nowadays to be, first you pick between React or a similar framework, and then the backend just sends API data and doesn't mess with HTML. This makes for better websites, and it makes joint web and mobile development easier too, because you're going to have to build that API anyway for your mobile app.

Python has some very frosty deep roots in PL theory and practice, and it's a billion times better than C and a trillion times better than C++. (Java was and still is uncool.)

Python became popular because it was so much easier and more fun than the other languages and it's (very serious) problems weren't as obvious back when the BDFL was running things, or until your project gets large.

(We should all just use Lisp, ffs.)

You could kind of write Java in Python, and thus a certain kind of enterprise techie couldn’t dismiss Python as “just” a scripting language.