My opinion: Python may not be the best at everything it does, but it's in the top 3-5 languages in the following areas:

• Very easy to install, write and understand
• Great libraries for a lot of applications
• Large community, lots of people with experience in it

It will always be a practical choice for those reasons. There are probably a lot more as well that I can't think of at the moment.

I think it's just because it is always recommended as an "easy" language that's good for beginners.

The only other thing it has going for it is that it has a REPL (and even that was shit until very recently), which I think is why it became popular for research.

It doesn't have anything else going for it really.

• It's extraordinarily slow
• The static type hints are pretty decent if you use Pyright but good luck convincing the average Python dev to do that.
• The tooling is awful. uv is a lifesaver there but even with uv it's a bit of a mess.
• The package system is a mess. Most people just want to import files using a relative path, but that's pretty much impossible without horrible hacks.
• The official documentation is surprisingly awful.
• Implicit variable declaration is a stupid footguns.

The actual syntax is not too bad really, but everything around it is.

It’s kind of crazy how problematic pip is, though. There are enormous ecosystems like conda, poetry, arguably Docker all built around “pip not working right.”

I see so many people want to install vllm or something with like a 95% crash and burn rate if they aren’t already proficient with Docker, complete with the spare disk space to basically ship a whole other machine.

Meanwhile, massively complex Rust or Go or whatever packages… just work. With the native tooling, for me.

To be clear, I like Python, and I believe many issues can be smoothed with time (like improving its JIT and maybe encouraging more typing in codebases). But pip and its ecosystem are forever cursed.

The blog gives a few vague answers, none of which shed any light on how Python became so popular. If I had to guess, much of it's popularity came from being embraced as a data analytics tool -- which is honestly a great use case for an interpreted scripting language -- and its subsequent adoption by academia, introducing it to an entire generation of CS grads.

Python has advantages and drawbacks like any programming language. It's not my favorite language and it's not my least favorite. It's not going anywhere anytime soon.

From an administrator POV, python is great for scripting, automation, and AWS boto work.

I would argue it's because it is Good Enough. The most popular solutions to things are rarely the optimum ones but the ones that are generally applicable.

For example, I could fight with bash's unpleasant syntax or I could do it more easily (but less efficiently) with Python. Would it be as performant? Absolutely not - but the performance gains wouldn't be worth the time and maintainability.

Presumably because it minimizes developer time in writing code and is easy to use and it come with great libraries. That is why I have been using it since 1998.

Edit: People use to think I was crazy using Python. It was interesting seeing people slowly get a clue over the years.

In the Python documentary they mention the early creation of numeric as an alternative for closed options like Matlab; which led to Python being used in the sciences and data processing. Then later it became the natural choice for machine learning in the early 2010s and the AI explosion of 2020+.

Because most people are lazy hacks.

Python is one of 4 key programming languages in world. C as a systems/performance/building block language (which I get has competitors). Javascript for node performance and web language. J as being the most powerful syntax/paradigm and best designed language.

Python has to be the most important due to all of the support it has, including C++ and other building block language/library imports that allows it to be the LLM integrator choice. A field that moves so fast, you couldn't import libraries fast enough in another environment. Another shoutout to J is that its terseness is a good LLM fit due to less token consumption. But integrating with python is essential.

I'd say libraries is why it is popular. Also, I'm not a Python developer, and I don't bother with libraries.