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It has very little to do with Python itself. Python won because GvR ran an extremely tight ship. And there were many extremely talented core developers that he

It has very little to do with Python itself. Python won because GvR ran an extremely tight ship. And there were many extremely talented core developers that helped make Python a polished product. The development team made all the right decisions, except for rejecting PEP 355 which was a big mistake. The batteries included approach helped grow the ecosystem. Developers wrote third party libraries in the hopes of them eventually, someday be incorporated into Python's standard library. Python also came in an msi installer and made the Windows experience pleasant, unlike Ruby and Perl which iirc were painful to get up and running.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago
> PEP 355 Didn't this eventually become what is now pathlib (which I am a big fan of) ?
- VerminOctopus1 3y ago
  pathlib is truly excellent! The overlap with the os library is unfortunate, but I can’t complain.
vodou 3y ago
> except for rejecting PEP 355 which was a big mistake Looks like you are the author of PEP 355. Well, we got pathlib in the end. It's not that bad.
stevesimmons 3y ago
> Python also came in an msi installer and made the Windows experience pleasant For a long time, the official Windows Python distribution was overshadowed by ActiveState's, called ActivePython. That included more Windows-specific packages such as win32com, and the very capable PythonWin IDE from Mark Hammond. That was my go-to Python around 2000-2005. ActiveState was also notable in the early 2000s for hosting the Python Cookbook, the main repository of useful Python snippets and scripts. This was long before PyPI, StackOverflow and Github.
- physicsguy 3y ago
  That and Enthought Canopy, which bundled Spyder, SciPy, NumPy and came a bit later but before Anaconda