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Comment by aserafini | Hacker News Reader

But interestingly that was not the case for Python which is definitely in the top 5 most popular languages today. I wonder how/why Python accomplished this without any corporate backer?

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Python always has had a few really strong killer apps. In the past stuff like Zope (GvR himself worked for a few years on this, and it's still around), and more recently things like Django, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, PyTorch or open scientific computing in general.

Python seems like a very popular choice when the time comes to replace bash or perl scripting from the 90s. Oodles of internal tooling and OS tools in the Linux space use it.

I don't understand why people needed or used Zope. Can someone explain?

Python was one of only 3 languages allowed at Google (along with Java and C++) back in the 2000s.

That's one exception I had in mind. It was a no-name language before Google adopted it in the 2000s, but that was internal and couldn't have had effects except the downstream effects on general sentiment around Python. Python was just so nice of a language compared to its competitors that the community created an ecosystem. That's very hard to replicate. A lot of these new languages I'm seeing are just incremental improvements.

That is what people tend think, the corporate backers were all the Guido employers, and back in the old days (Python 1.6 and such), Zope was the big reason to use Python.

Schools. There was ba major push to teach python in high schools and colleges.

Python, TCL, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Lua, and more. So it happens, just not recently.

Python, all the Guido employers, Zope was big during the early 2000's.

TCL designed at Sun, pushed on the Web early days with application servers like AOL Server and Revit (or something similar have forgotten the name).

Perl was introduced in UNIX since the early days and was the tool to use when sed and awk scripts got too complicated.

Ruby was made famous thanks to Rails, and gets very little use outside Rails.

Lua, used as scripting language in a couple of game engines, made famous via World of Warcraft.

TCL was pretty well established before Ousterhout went to Sun.

You could argue it was chosen by Linux, since it was bundled in most distros.

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