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A comment on Why MIT Switched from Scheme to Python (2009).

Re:Why MIT Switched from Scheme to Python (2009) by cs702 on Friday April 21, 2017 @04:41PM (#14169267)
"And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all."

That, right there, is the reason why I end up using Python so often.

As dynamic languages go, Python is not the best for anything, but it's good enough for almost everything, and there's probably already a library implemented for it.

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Re:Why MIT Switched from Scheme to Python (2009) by dTal on Monday April 24, 2017 @07:46PM (#14189519)
Well, that tells us something about you. But it doesn't exactly get to the heart of why people like writing libraries for Python.

My theory: it was the first language to take a human factors approach to language design. Not the best, but the first. This design philosophy has the simple consequence that Python programs are by and large incredibly easy to read, understand, and modify, compared to its contemporaries. "Network effects" did the rest.

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