It was multiple things, really. I would attribute ute some of it to Swig, Perl attrition, SCons/Software Carpentry, integration with GUI libraries, good documentation, and various other efforts in the mid 2000s. A lot of those things were solving research problems simply, and Python’s use just kept expanding.
Python was already taking over in many use cases by late 2000s.
Ruby was known, but it didn’t have the following at multiple levels in academia like Python did
Python was already taking over in many use cases by late 2000s.
Ruby was known, but it didn’t have the following at multiple levels in academia like Python did