This makes me wonder what did cause Python's / Ruby's rise in popularity if there weren't any huge changes to the languages themselves in that time. I guess maybe the emergence of Rails in Ruby's case? And for Python, I don't know, Django? Numpy?
I think the stronger the standard library, the more likely your language will be adopted. If anyone out there is building a language and has strong funding, invest in database drivers and a strong web framework that compliments your language and showcases its capabilities. I would love for D's Vibe.d to be more polished, seems they got as far as they wanted to and stopped, I havent seen much new in half a decade compared to other web frameworks.
- extremely simple, easy to learn.
- progressive learning (you can start with very little knowledge and add later)
- strongly encouraging a single way to do things, promoting readability
- minimal scalfolding - write once, run everywhere (in theory)
- many included libraries + a large ecosystem
I used to write in Perl and had to constantly go back to the book to get the syntax right, and one day tried Python, and cut my time to write stuff in half, was able to reread and understand my code, and so were others.
This doesn't seem to be so true nowadays. Python gives you lots of ways to do many things.
Python's rise in popularity is probably because it was a much nicer alternative to Perl. The percentage of non-programmers I would encounter using Python was significantly higher than those using Perl.
And then there was its "batteries included" philosophy.
And, of course, it came preinstalled with most Linux distributions.
That is, it was not uncommon to have a requirement that you cannot install new languages. But you could pip install dependencies, as that did not necessarily change the full system.
So, since Python was already installed, it had a toe in the door that the likes of Ruby did not.
Granted... Dependency management in Python has revealed itself to be a minefield...
Their communities adopted explicit "this language is for DOING shit understandably, not golfing, not squeezing cpu cycles, not researching type systems, not timtowtdi, etc." That helped tremendously.
In pythons case, it was very easy to wrap up C and C++ code and lift it into a nice environment with a repl and everything else you need to experiment. This put it in an excellent position to grow along with the scientific community. Numpy was a huge asset here.
The rise of rails, Django, heroku, MacBooks as the dominant coding environment etc all fostered an environment where coding went from being nerd shit to being fashionable. This ushered in the era of "people who code for reasons other than being huge fucking computer nerds," in which the benefits of Python and Ruby mentioned above became even more relevant.
Most of the claim of what the community in successful languages did, is so steeped in confirmation and survivor bias that it is hard to see it as more than just popular marketing.
So. No. I am not ignoring these claims. But nor will I assume their truth. If you have actual studies showing they are easier, I'm interested. Enthusiastic claims from members of the community don't count, sadly.