Hah!

Ruby, Python, and Perl all had similarly good package ecosystems in the late 1990s, and I think any of them could have ended up as the dominant scripting language. Then Google chose Python as its main scripting language, invested hundreds of millions of dollars, and here we are. It's not as suitable as Matlab, R, or Julia for numerical work, but money made it good enough.

(Sort of like how Java and later JavaScript VMs came to dominate: you can always compensate for poor upfront design with enough after-the-fact money.)