[andrewflnr]

Come on, we all know a language and its library ecosystem go hand in hand. Trying to separate them from the standpoint of adoption is pointless. TFA comes to its conclusion by looking at libraries. In your hypothetical where Perl or Ruby take Python's place, that would manifest as Perl or Ruby having better data science libraries. The causality would probably be just as cyclical as it is for any "best language/library for task X" question.