[madhadron]

> 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.