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A comment on Functional programming is not popular because it is weird (2016). Parent comment

Re:Functional programming is not popular because it is weird... by goto11 on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @03:23AM (#28521429)
People are learning Python because they want to do ML or scientific computing - not the other way around. Python has its current popularity because of NumPy and the whole numeric and ML ecosystem.

I love Python as a language, but realistically it could just as well have been Ruby or some other language.

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Re:Functional programming is not popular because it is weird... by arc-in-space on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @04:19AM (#28521775)
Python was already quite popular by the time 3.0 came out in 2008, well before the AI summer was in full swing, which is a large part of what drove the popularity of NumPy et al.

You're not wrong now, but that's just the chicken, the egg included web applications and its use as a scripting language.

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Re:Functional programming is not popular because it is weird... by pjmlp on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @05:32AM (#28522254)
Python was already the scripting language of choice at CERN when I was there about 20 years ago.

Summer School computing classes even used to teach unit testing in Python.

And the Atlas HLT/DAQ build scripts were based on Python.

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Re:Functional programming is not popular because it is weird... by beowulfey on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @06:33AM (#28522664)
The counter example you’d probably want to use is Julia — it was written with scientific computing in mind, but is nowhere near as popular.
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Re:Functional programming is not popular because it is weird... by twistedpair on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @11:20AM (#28526182)
Seems that NumPy was written in Python b/c the ML community was using Python, not the other way around.
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