[irrational]

I don't know for sure, but some possible reasons include: 1. I've read that a lot of universities have adopted it as the first language to teach CS students (the local high school also uses it to teach programming to students), 2. When I read questions about what to move to from PHP for a web backend there are lots of recommendations to use Python, 3. It seems like a lot of people use it for data analysis tasks, 4. Python is often used with hardware like Arduino, 5. It is often used for scripting tasks.

[berti]

Yes, my university switched all 100-level CS papers from Java to Python quite a number of years back (~10). Then came 200-level EE classes, straight into C on bare-metal. :D