I first bumped into python because mailman was written in it. It was a large, slow and a bit funny. I saw it as another odd academic language that had spilled o

I first bumped into python because mailman was written in it. It was a large, slow and a bit funny. I saw it as another odd academic language that had spilled out of a university somewhere. Then in about 2005 I heard about zope, and how easy and wonderful it was compared to php. But it was slow and memory heavy. In about 2008 more and more stuff started getting python bindings, specifically in VFX (where I was working). There was a tussle between javascript and python, and python won out, even displacing MEL and other domain specific languages. Ruby was always more obscure to me, it was for people that likes C and wanted a more perl-y version of it, but without the anachy or the universality of CPAN. I think the biggest reason was that it had loads of stuff in the standard lib, way more than anything else at the time. Much more than perl, so it meant that things were a bit more "portable". So people came for the stdlib, then started adding things to it because they'd spent all that time learning it.