My 2c. And only my recollection. Back in the stone age, there were two that had significant mindshare: perl and python. Of course, there were others, and they had their day in the sun too (e.g. rexx, rebol, etc.). I suspect that python stood out, and developed momentum, because of its availability on, and integration with, Windows where many of today's senior devs were cutting their teeth. Particularly, I'd point out, Mark Hammond's contributions. Suddenly, you had an accessible language with a deep integration with the underlying OS. Perl had that too, if you were using one of the unices, but most eager devs weren't - back then, linux wasn't what it is today. Perl excelled at the traditional file-based (and filelike-based) tasks. It had a good niche in early web development using cgi. But, I think python was just both more accessible in general, and more useful in general than perl - without resorting to C, or C++, or another compiled language.