I think there's a very good chance that this is being driven by the flap around data science, and the big push toward teaching programming in schools. Assuming

I think there's a very good chance that this is being driven by the flap around data science, and the big push toward teaching programming in schools. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that that's true, it means that we've got to think about how you define "programmer". Does it mean anyone who uses a programming language, or does it mean something more like "software developer"? TIOBE, for example, effectively measures popularity among the former group, not the latter. Which means that, in the case of Python popularity, it's going to be picking up on all sorts of things: analysts and BI people ditching Excel in favor of Pandas, ops people ditching piles of shell scripts in favor of Ansible, graduate students choosing Scipy over R or Matlab, 7th graders with Pi-tops, ...