by BeetleB | 2025-10-02 15:08:06+00:00
> Most languages got popular due to a specific project or product getting popular or a specific company marketing them.

This is a bold assertion, and IMO, false.

What was the killer product/company marketing that made Perl popular?

> So, did Python have a killer app or library that caused it to take off industrially? Or did that not matter? You mentioned NumPy/SciPy in academia.

It really didn't. It was already popular before, say, Django came around. Yes, NumPy/SciPy are kind of the reason ML is on Python, but the reality is people in academia chose NumPy/SciPy over MATLAB because it allowed them to use Python libraries in their code, which MATLAB could not. In other words, the academics chose to use NumPy/SciPy because they already were into Python.

For many, Python was just a much nicer alternative to Perl, and it was one of the main "batteries included" languages. That's why it became popular. Keep in mind that Python did not become popular quickly. It came out in 1990 and took about a decade to become somewhat popular.

The only other thing I can think of is this essay by Eric Raymond in 2000:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/3882

"My second came a couple of hours into the project, when I noticed (allowing for pauses needed to look up new features in Programming Python) I was generating working code nearly as fast as I could type. When I realized this, I was quite startled.

This was my first clue that, in Python, I was actually dealing with an exceptionally good design. Most languages have so much friction and awkwardness built into their design that you learn most of their feature set long before your misstep rate drops anywhere near zero. Python was the first general-purpose language I'd ever used that reversed this process.

...

I wrote a working, usable fetchmailconf, with GUI, in six working days, of which perhaps the equivalent of two days were spent learning Python itself. This reflects another useful property of the language: it is compact--you can hold its entire feature set (and at least a concept index of its libraries) in your head. C is a famously compact language. Perl is notoriously not; one of the things the notion “There's more than one way to do it!” costs Perl is the possibility of compactness.

...

To say I was astonished would have been positively wallowing in understatement. It's remarkable enough when implementations of simple techniques work exactly as expected the first time; but my first metaclass hack in a new language, six days from a cold standing start? Even if we stipulate that I am a fairly talented hacker, this is an amazing testament to Python's clarity and elegance of design.

There was simply no way I could have pulled off a coup like this in Perl, even with my vastly greater experience level in that language. It was at this point I realized I was probably leaving Perl behind.

...

So the real punchline of the story is this: weeks and months after writing fetchmailconf, I could still read the fetchmailconf code and grok what it was doing without serious mental effort. And the true reason I no longer write Perl for anything but tiny projects is that was never true when I was writing large masses of Perl code."