[ncmncm]

Very little money was ever spent hyping Python.

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

[ryanbrunner]

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.