I would politely disagree. Torch started in Lua, and switched to Python because of its already soaring popularity. Whatever drove Python's growth predates modern AI frameworks
As far as I could tell, it had to do with two things. First, Python is notoriously dynamic and extensible, making it possible to implement "sloppy" syntax like advanced slicing or dataframes. But also, those guys had lots of pre-existing C and Fortran code, and Python had one of the easiest extensibility APIs to wrap it as high-level packages. And with IPython, you had a nice REPL with graphing to use all that from, and then of course notebooks happened.
It had boosts from Django... but it never had Rails' level of popularity. You kinda have to be first-to-market and that good to get the "killer app" effect.
It's also been integrated as the scripting language for several popular software pacakges (Blender comes to mind).
Machine learning and now... "AI"; seems to be a market cornered by Python quite a bit.
It hit the front page of Slashdot, Digg, Reddit, made the rounds on Hacker news, etc... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=86246)
Django was also very popular at the time.
I had already learned Basic, C++, Java, and C#. I wanted to add a dynamic scripting language that was cross-platform under my belt.
A lot of my peers were in the same boat.
Python seemed at the time, to be the only general purpose scripting language that was easy to use on multiple platforms.
I had heard bad things about Perl being write only, and Ruby being tough to deploy, I also found it hard to read. (Which is a shame they are wonderful languages, though Ruby is dog slow, Python is slow too, but Ruby is worse somehow).
IIRC Google and some other large companies were pushing it as one of their official languages.
Right as Python was rocketing in popularity, Go came out, and I also heard a lot of good things about Clojure (they seemed neck and neck in popularity from my incorrect perspective at the time, lol).
Do you mean the comic was responsible, or the comic explains why Python is popular? It is definitely the ecosystem. As you said its general purpose. It is used for numerical computing and visualisation, web apps, GUIs, sysadmin. Even a reasonably popular DVCS is written in Python.
I wasn’t talking chronology of first release, just describing the overlap in hype cycles back then.
The comic was released in 2007, and started heading to the moon. Go came out around 2009, and almost instantly got traction.