Richard Feldman states in a video aiming to explain the popularity of OOP that Python initially had a small community for decades, and that Python's increase in popularity followed a slow and steady increase, which is not true of many other languages like Ruby. That's corroborated by the graph in this article. [0]

Based on Python's slow and steady incresae, timing and luck don't seem like good factors for explaining its popularity. The others are debatable though.

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https://flatironschool.com/blog/python-popularity-the-rise-o...