Ask HN: Why did Python win?
Python ended up &#x27;specializing&#x27; in data contexts, thanks to Numpy &#x2F; Pandas, and as a result, ended up becoming the first exposure to programming than anyone doing data stuff had. That was millions of people. In that space, it had no competitors.<p>Ruby ended up &#x27;specializing&#x27; in web dev, because of Rails. But when Node and React came out, Ruby on Rails had to compete with Nodejs + React &#x2F; MERN as a way of building a web app. Since people first learning programming to build a web app would usually start with javascript anyway (since a lot of very first projects might not even need a backend), it was a lot easier for the Nodejs&#x2F;React route to become the default path. Whereas if you were a data scientist, you started on python, and as you got better, you basically just kept using python.