What many others here are saying is correct. Python was fairly popular, and considered a great language that good developers wanted to develop in, way before Ru

What many others here are saying is correct. Python was fairly popular, and considered a great language that good developers wanted to develop in, way before Ruby became popular. Just look at this article by Paul Graham, written in 2004, called "The Python Paradox" http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html http://www.paulgraham.com/pypar.html: > I didn't mean by this that Java programmers are dumb. I meant that Python programmers are smart. It's a lot of work to learn a new programming language. And people don't learn Python because it will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know. > Which makes them exactly the kind of programmers companies should want to hire. This was written more or less at the same time that Ruby on Rails was first released. Clearly by then, people had known about Python for a while. That head-start led it to be more popular early on, except in webdev circles specifically. But in the other circles, and especially in Academia, Python was gaining popularity, which helped it both get lots of great scientific libraries (making it today's default "data" language), and also made it eventually become a language taught in Universities.