> the only reason it’s so popular today is because Google pushed it so hard in the first decade of the 2000s I've been using Python since the 1990s and I remem

> the only reason it’s so popular today is because Google pushed it so hard in the first decade of the 2000s I've been using Python since the 1990s and I remember the Python conference really growing because of Zope. Later was Django, and NumPy finally solidified the previous numarray, Numeric, etc. confusion, which helped with a lot of scientific and engineering projects. I struggle to think of what big influence Google had in the first decade of the 2000s. The "abc" module? Getting people to use App Engine? van Rossum had 50% time to work on Python, and I believe Google employed a few other core developers? > They probably would have wanted to embrace Java, as they were already using it with Android, Umm, but they were using Python from the beginning. Flash back to 1995 (!), quoting Scott Hassan at https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-excerpt-google https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/07/valley-of-genius-exc... : ] And I was fixing some of the bugs that he was having with Java .... And I remember thinking, Wow, this is insane!, because I was spending a lot of time fixing this underlying tool. And so one weekend, I just took all his code, I took his whole entire thing, and threw it all out, ... I knew I could get the thing working if I used a language I knew very well, called Python. ... So Larry went from barely downloading a 100, to doing 32,000 [pages] simultaneously on a single machine. That's why Python was already established at Google long before Android. Anyway, this essay contains the usual criticisms about Python: - 2 vs. 3 (a valid opinion a few years ago, IMO, but fading now) - requires an explicit 'self' - no distinction between declaration and initialization - no private variables - whitespace indentation instead of braces - dynamic typing - no constants Those seem like valid personal opinions, but little more than that.