| > I can't imagine Python's welcoming community has anything to do with it. If anything it was Ruby that had a reputation for being the most welcoming community with its MINASWAN (cringe) philosophy. TBH, community had nothing to do with Python's enormous success over its competitors (Perl, and Ruby. Possibly Tcl too.). Nor did any technical merit, nor ergonomics. There's one, and only one, reason why Python exploded at the expense of the other competitors: The ease and acceptance of using the language as glue for C functions. Python's popularity is built on a solid foundation compatibility with C. If, in the 90s, C++ had taken off enough to displace C, I doubt Python would be as popular as it is. Python owes its ubiquity to C, because if C was not ubiquitous, Python wouldn't be either. (It's only recently, like the last 10 year or so, that I started seeing popular Python programs which didn't have a dependency on C libraries. And even now, it's still rare to see). |
My experience of trying to get my own C functions to use in Python to have been nightmarish. Yes, you can do it... if you have exactly the same compiler & version used to produce the python interpreter itself.
C's only usefulness to Python is: it allows optimization of the 80/20 or 90/10 rule, so performance doesn't have to totally suck with Python.
Python 'won' IMHO because it hit a sweet spot -- simple enough for beginners, in fact, beginner-friendly, but due to having a good basic set of datatypes (lists, tuples, sets, plus the usual ints, floats, and complex) -- this allowed complex ideas to be compactly expressed. The ability to switch between functional and imperative styles also helped.
Python is a 'good enough' lisp. MIT switched, and Norvig has said as much.
No, the astonishing thing is that Python survived the 2->3 transition, and came out stronger on the other end. Language cleanups, new 'syntactic sugar' (e.g. @ as the decorator syntax), and what you see is Python is trying to actively steal all the successful programming paradigms under one unified syntax.
Is python perfect? Hardly. But it's beginner-friendly and expert-optimized. AND, unlike C++ (at least for me), you can get ALL of Python into your head at the same time. (Libraries, ok, but true in any language). In this specific sense, it is exactly like C (you can keep it all in your head, even the edge cases).
There are newer languages gunning for a piece of Python's mindshare (Zig, Nim). But because Python is a moving target: getting better and better, the others will need to provide a spectacular use-case advantage --- and I just don't see that happening.