I personally don’t think it is because in the face of many modern languages, it doesn’t do any one thing the best and doesn’t present an interesting paradigm. Is there something it does interesting that I can’t find in languages like F#, Racket, or Elixir?
But my question was trying to understand if Python has some hidden mojo that Norvig really likes or if he uses it like this publicly because he’s a top leader at a company that also uses it heavily. People listen to people like that in positions like his, and if he did all his solutions in Julia, F#, or whatever, that’d probably route a good amount of attention to those other languages that Google and his book doesn’t really use or hire for.
> it doesn’t do any one thing the best and doesn’t present an interesting paradigm
That's absolutely true. But once you've been through the language paradigms, written Forth and Prolog and Haskell and APL and Lisp, you don't gain much by immersing in a new language.
At that point you start looking for languages where the things you loathe about them intersect minimally with what you work on. Python has relatively little to loathe and is very convenient. I still reach for it by default as well, and I was at one point best known for my Haskell work.
It has nothing to do with Google marketing. Norvig's established enough where he lends luster to Google, not vice versa.
But my question was trying to understand if Python has some hidden mojo that Norvig really likes or if he uses it like this publicly because he’s a top leader at a company that also uses it heavily. People listen to people like that in positions like his, and if he did all his solutions in Julia, F#, or whatever, that’d probably route a good amount of attention to those other languages that Google and his book doesn’t really use or hire for.