In the early 00's in the banks (and other places): Perl was everywhere on the server side, and generally horribly unmaintainable because of TIMTOWDI. On the cl

In the early 00's in the banks (and other places): Perl was everywhere on the server side, and generally horribly unmaintainable because of TIMTOWDI. On the client side Visual Basic was everywhere. The stars aligned: on the server Python was easier to write, only one way to do it (sort of), and on the client, Python was in some ways similar to Visual Basic (not character soup), and was adopted there as well. And to a lesser extent, Python was also more 'write once run everywhere' than Java. To quote someone else here, it wasn't the best language, but it was the second best language, and hit the sweet spot for so many domains.