[kriro]

The key advantage of Python is that it's good enough at many things and that there is a giant infrastructure of libraries and a huge community (and thus tutorials, howtos, stackoverflow answers etc.).

You mention Julia/C++/R for ML. My counterargument would be that things like fast.ai exist, use Python and make the whole topic approachable. I also find it a bit hard to belive many people that don't come from a stats/other academic field background would readily pick R over Python for anything ML related. I personally never thought JS was very beginner friendly because setup was traditionally clunky. That has thankfully changed a lot.

You mention many things that are better in theory but in practice I need to get work done now. I'd probably rather write quick scripts in Python (or bash) than Deno for example.

It's probably also easier to hire for Python than Ruby at least I'm not convinced Ruby has a giant edge. Huge, stable community is also exactly what Python has.

Python also has mindshare in many niches for example in security many things are quickly scripted in Python (notoriously Python 2 in some cases). Go and Ruby are also used for a lot of tooling there.

At the end of the day, if someone from a non-programming background asks me what language to learn, I still recommend Python (because usually they either want to pivot into ML somehow or want to get some quick scripting done to automate something or want to scrape some data). If I were to teach my child, I'd probably pick what I consider the most fun and completely ignore employability (Elixir) and if I were to build a CS program from sratch I'd have to think long and hard. I might end on Rust or Go but JS would be in the running (depends if there's a big focus on embedded/osdev etc.).

At the end of the day, "pick whatever language gets the job done" is still the best recommendation in my opinion :)

[culi]

> The key advantage of Python is that it's good enough at many things and that there is a giant infrastructure of libraries and a huge community

Right that's exactly my point. But once that's gone there's not really anything left for it. JS is also good enough at everything and probably has a larger community and more stability given it's the language of the web. Def not there in terms of ML yet, but it can get there

> I'd probably rather write quick scripts in Python

Because you're used to it.

> It's probably also easier to hire for Python than Ruby

If we're talking backend, an even easier thing to higher for than both of them is JS/TS

> Python also has mindshare in many niches for example in security many things are quickly scripted in Python

Yup. Again, this is the momentum of its community, but not anything inherent to it

> "pick whatever language gets the job done"

I don't disagree that that language isn't usually Python today. I'm just saying all of its success is due to the community and ecosystem so I don't see any guarantee that this will still be the case many years from now

[disgruntledphd2]

> I also find it a bit hard to belive many people that don't come from a stats/other academic field background would readily pick R over Python for anything ML related

I agree with this, but actually suspect that it's a good thing. People without some experience of stats probably shouldn't be using ML, and if R use helps to identify these people, I'm all for it.

That being said, basically every company has standardised on Python, some for good reasons and others because of the PR Python has gotten through DL stuff.