[zahlman]

> Racket, CLisp

Syntax really does matter more than you give it credit for. Were that not the case, I'd expect one Lisp or Scheme dialect or other to take Python's place. Outside of that counterfactual, Python's competition was stuff like Ruby, and it turned out that network effects were also pretty important.

[throwaway81523]

Python's main competition was Perl. Ruby was later, I think.