[kitd]

It was popular as a teaching language when it started out, along side BASIC or Pascal. When the Web took off, it was one of a few that took off for scripting simple backends, along side PHP, JS and Ruby.

But the real explosion happened with ML.

[trwired]

I agree with the person you're replying to. Python was definitely already a thing before ML. The way I remember it is it started taking off as a nice scripting language that was more user friendly than Perl, the king of scripting languages at the time. The popularity gain accelerated with the proliferation of web frameworks, with Django tailgating immensely popular at the time Ruby on Rails and Flask capturing the micro-framework enthusiast crowd. At the same time the perceived ease of use and availability of numeric libraries established Python in scientific circles. By the time ML started breaking into mainstream, Python was already one of the most popular programming languages.

[tmtvl]

As I remember it there was a time when Ruby and Python were the two big up-and-coming scripting languages while Perl was in decline.

[toraway]

That is correct. I "came of age" in 2010-11 during the Web 2.0 era of web apps beginning to eat the world. Ruby was just starting to come down from its peak as the new hotness, and Python thanks to Django + Google's support/advocacy was becoming the new Next Big Thing for the web and seemed like a no-brainer to learn as my main tool back at the time.

At the time Java was the mature but boring "enterprise" alternative to both, but also beginning its decline in web mindshare as Ruby/Python (then JavaScript/Node) were seen as solving much of the verbosity/complexity associated with Java.

There was a lot of worry that the Python 2->3 controversy was threatening to hurt its adoption, but that concern came from Python in a position of strength/growing fast.

Python's latter day positioning as the ML/scientific computing language of choice came as its position in the web was being gobbled up by JavaScript by the day and was by then well on the downswing for web, for a variety of technical/aesthetic reasons but also just simply no longer being "cool" vs. a Node/NoSQL stack.

[kitd]

Sure, but the point was that it being used for web backends was years after it was invented, an area in which it never ruled the roost. ML is where it has gained massive traction outside SW dev.