[nijave]

I suspect some of the popularity came from IT and engineering departments preferring to run Python compared to, say, Matlab, Excel, or some other GUI based application not designed to run on servers. R also has a lot of adoption but I think Python is a little more natural to run since so many infrastructure tools are written in Python

It also works fairly well cross platform. That means you can develop on Windows and run on Linux without too many issues (at least for ML/AI stuff, common frameworks usually have per platform binaries published)

i.e. Python is familiar to the people supporting production systems