alt Hacker NewsI agree with the person you're replying to. Python was definitely already a thing before ML. The way I remember it is it started taking off as a nice scripting language that was more user friendly than Perl, the king of scripting languages at the time. The popularity gain accelerated with the proliferation of web frameworks, with Django tailgating immensely popular at the time Ruby on Rails and Flask capturing the micro-framework enthusiast crowd. At the same time the perceived ease of use and availability of numeric libraries established Python in scientific circles. By the time ML started breaking into mainstream, Python was already one of the most popular programming languages.
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Sure, but the point was that it being used for web backends was years after it was invented, an area in which it never ruled the roost. ML is where it has gained massive traction outside SW dev.
As I remember it there was a time when Ruby and Python were the two big up-and-coming scripting languages while Perl was in decline.