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.
https://xkcd.com/353/
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).