IMHO, Python was already in the Unix/Linux university IT fighting perl into the background as operating system scripting .. that was at least my first contact .

IMHO, Python was already in the Unix/Linux university IT fighting perl into the background as operating system scripting .. that was at least my first contact .. and when then the universities looked at something more simpler than Java, Python was already everywhere in their sysadmins hearts. The space was not that crowded back then: Go/Rust did not exist, C# was Windows only, Perl was a mess, PHP was web only, Java was hated, Lua a niche and C++ too low level. And JavaScript was that slow thing in the desktop browsers. It was python or ruby and python like said was on every system and ruby the exotic thing.