Python is much older than Ruby in terms of wide adoption. Python became popular because: if you want to write a program that runs from the shell, uses file I/O

Python is much older than Ruby in terms of wide adoption. Python became popular because: if you want to write a program that runs from the shell, uses file I/O, terminal I/O and possibly network I/O, that's quick and easy to work with, and where the runtime is either already on your computer or can be installed painlessly, there weren't many alternatives. Shell script is too crappy a programming environment for anything non-trivial. Perl is a mess. Ruby isn't on the machine and is (still!) a nightmare to install. Compiled languages are not quick and easy to work with. JS doesn't exist yet (in a form usable from the shell). Tcl is too niche. Python is the least worse choice. All the stuff about ML and stats and Jupyter and what not is not relevant -- that came later as a consequence of Python already being popular. It's actually amazing that Python is still popular because it nearly shot its own feet off with the 3.0 nonsense. Most folks here probably don't even remember that...