alt Hacker News> I’ll never not be bitter than Python “won” the scripting language war over Ruby, more or less just because someone did a bit of AI work in it first and it took over that space by default.
This is just my personal opinion with no data to back it up, but I suspect that Python "won" because it has excellent Windows support, while Ruby doesn't. Even a decade ago, Python's website offered an official native Windows installer [0], while Ruby's website [1] still points you to a third-party installer, which doesn't even have native support since it uses MSYS2 [2].
Most non-developers use Windows, so if you're choosing the first language to teach a large group of people, good Windows support is fairly important. Python being the "default" introductory language gave it a huge number of users, then I suspect that everything flowed down from there.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160824235759/https://www.pytho...
> but I suspect that Python "won" because it has excellent Windows support, while Ruby doesn't. Even a decade ago, Python's website offered an official native Windows installer
I think you might be able to go an additional decade backwards. Back in college most of my friends were on windows and one of them was using python for class projects.