Ask HN: Why did Python win?

Although I'm a proficient JavaScript programmer now, the idea of curly brackets were genuinely intimidating. Just something about that made the program seem more complex than necessary, and Python seemed really clean.

I also think the book `How to Think Like a Computer Scientist` is a large part of Python's success for beginners. In the early days, it was literally the only programming learning book that clicked for me, and it was in Python. Up until then, programming still felt esoteric.

The ability of python to integrate with C/C++ code went a long way to making it a long term viable platform. If you needed scripting you could code in regular python. If you needed advanced control of hardware in your scripts, you could write a python extension in C/C++ to gain access to that hardware. If you needed high performance, or high parallelism, you could likewise create an extension to solve those problems.

In this way Python was the best of both worlds. Elegant scripting which could be combined with blazing performance and low level hardware interfaces. This aspect of the language allowed it to have a wide footprint (as opposed to just the browser) and to leverage legacy libraries effectively - e.g. BLAS.

I personally did crazy stuff like: "embed a python interpreter in a C program, to use python scripting within the program" back in like 1999.

Sometimes the key to success is to just be adequate for a really long time.