A lot of people who picked up Python, especially in the 1990s, picked it up as a side language. They were doing "serious" programming in C or C++, and they need

A lot of people who picked up Python, especially in the 1990s, picked it up as a side language. They were doing "serious" programming in C or C++, and they needed another powerful, potentially cryptic language like they needed a hole in the head. I believe that Python gained popularity among scientists for the same reason. They needed a simple programming language, not because they lacked brainpower, but because their job was to focus their intelligence on the scientific problems they were solving, not on programming. Writing code was necessary but not meaningful in itself, like washing beakers or feeding lab rats. The less effort it took, the better. For people like that, Python won because they were able to become productive with it while learning very little about it. Also, it was rare to accidentally write Python code that was hard to read. This was especially important for scientists, who didn't have a software engineer's appreciation of the difficulty of reading code and the need to practice restraint when writing it.