[arnvald]

Years ago I wrote article on this topic: https://www.notonlycode.org/why-python-has-won/

In short (all below is my opinion): it was popular in academia and got some corporate adoption, so when ML exploded in popularity it was a natural choice as the scripting language for ML tooling. On top of that it’s easy to pick up as a language, and it’s a general purpose language - there are lots of scientific tools like pandas written in it, there are web frameworks, etc.

Perl was too quirky for wide adoption and it stopped developing (Raku/Perl 6 took to long to develop), PHP was focused purely on the web, similarly JS. Ruby could have won, I like it more than Python, but outside of Japan it’s also mostly been associated with web development (because of Rails), it also lacked libraries that Python already had.

[zephen]

> Ruby could have won,

Seems unlikely. Its got its own fair share of Perl-inspired quirks.