[zephyrfalcon]

"In fact if you go back in time and look at some of the first versions of Python it's a very, very ugly language and it does not come as a surprise that not too many people took notice of Python in the early days."

I don't know... Python in the early 90s looked pretty much the same as it does now. Unless you mean that some features (or lack of them) required inelegant workarounds?

I think most machines were just not powerful enough yet in the 90s to make Python a viable solution for many problems. As computers got faster, that became less of an issue. Also, there was already a scripting language with a large following back then (Perl, naturally). Whether it was "ugly" probably had little to do with it. (Quite the contrary in fact, I recall that Python was often perceived as clean, elegant, concise and very readable.)

[chalst]

No GC, coupled with Guido's ignorant comments about how superior refcounts were.

Wacky three namespace scoping.

Back in those days, Python seemed cleaner than it was.

[kzrdude]

In a way that's still true. I'm thinking of `nonlocal` and attribute lookup which is all too complicated.

[DrCatbox]

And the GIL, in a world of multi-core processors with each capable of several threads... a single process is meh.