This is just a feeling, but for me I was tired of the quirkiness of Perl, and Ruby offered yet more quirkiness. Python offered an opinionated and more crisp pr

This is just a feeling, but for me I was tired of the quirkiness of Perl, and Ruby offered yet more quirkiness. Python offered an opinionated and more crisp proposition, stating explicitly the goal among other things of having (paraphrasing the quote, so it might not be byte for byte) “one clear preferred way to do it” as opposed to the wild west that came before. And it had Google’s endorsement (Google was still respected at the time). JavaScript… wow. I think it’s gotten better now with more tooling and a rich ecosystem, so more power to it.