Python is over 20 years old. It has been here since before Windows 95 but only got prominent (in the broad public) in the last few years because some opinion le

Python is over 20 years old. It has been here since before Windows 95 but only got prominent (in the broad public) in the last few years because some opinion leaders of the hip and young crowd found out you could make cool web apps with it and hyped it into oblivion. Hmm, I thought it became popular for scientific applications and as an anti-Perl for scripting before it became popular for web apps? I first got into Python because I needed a scripting language. People said, "If you don't like the design philosophy of Perl, then you might like Python, which made the opposite choices." The centerpiece of Python advocacy back in the day was this article by Eric Raymond: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882 I know that's the article that convinced me to try Python. Everything he praised about Python screamed "opposite of Perl!" and after experiencing my mind rejecting Perl like a body rejecting a transplanted organ, I was desperate for an alternative that would make me as productive at scripting as the Perl gurus. (Yes, I'm still jealous of the one-liners.) So there is certainly room for a language to grow and become popular without having a first-class web framework. (These days any popular language will sprout a few web frameworks, but they don't have to become popular for the language to succeed.)