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If you look at the Google trends for ruby on rails (where the hype is clear) it looks markedly different to python (steady trend).

I remember that comic - I think it coincided not with anything special happening in the python world, it was just when Randall Munroe learned python.

Although I would say 2007 was close to the peak of Python bleeding "mindshare" due to the hype cycle of Ruby and Rails.

Very little money was ever spent hyping Python.

Python benefited enormously by contrast to Perl, despite being slower.

That's a function of when Python was popularized, where there was very little major corporate support for new open source libraries / frameworks. Ruby and Rails had their hype cycle around the same time, more or less on the back of a <50 employee company.

Nowadays, open source development has centralized far more on large public companies, so there's a lot more marketing effort being put on all the languages / frameworks / libraries out there.