> Not luck of the draw, it was because of the OOP craze in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Sure, but Tcl also had/has a well-regarded OO system, and Ruby was on the scene, so Python doesn’t actually stand out singularly.
Sure, but Tcl also had/has a well-regarded OO system, and Ruby was on the scene, so Python doesn’t actually stand out singularly.
Ruby didn't have very much mindshare in the U.S. during the relevant period. Which is a real shame. There's always been a significant amount of great work coming out of Japan that never gets popular attention elsewhere. Ruby is one of the notable exceptions, though it's break-out success came belatedly. (Wikipedia says the first English language Ruby mailing-list was created in 1999. AFAICT, O'Reilly's first Ruby book was "Ruby on Rails", published 2006. O'Reilly's "The Ruby Programming Language" wasn't published until 2008. All of these are indicative of an exceptionally late popular introduction to the English language programming community.)
I don't mean to imply that luck had nothing to do with Python's success. It's just that if you look at the contenders at the time and the qualities that people were (rightly or wrongly) looking for in a programming language, it's not at all surprising why Python gained popularity. To the degree luck had anything to do with it, it was largely the timing of those nexus of factors.
O'Reilly published Matz's Ruby in a Nutshell in 2001, but it didn't sell very well. When I worked there, I encouraged more Ruby publishing but only after I published the "Rolling with Ruby on Rails" articles (January 2005) did that argument get much traction.
The Pragmatic Programmers released their first Ruby programming book in 2000, by way of comparison (and Dave introduced me to DHH in 2004, which is how I decided to seek out the Rails articles).
Tcl made the crucial (in retrospect wrong) decision not to support a central extension package repository or well-stocked releases and chose to focus on the core. This forced users to scrounge the web for extensions and hope they compiled on their platforms, and depend on sketchy support from individual authors.
The OOP craze played a significant role as well I think. I recall that in the late 1990s Tcl was part of something of a renaissance of varied programming paradigms escaping academia and getting applied in the wild (partly in the form of clever Tcl extensions). But Java/OOP and WWW/server-client killed that movement dead.