> I would argue that python's popularity comes with numpy/pandas, jupyter notebooks, and the recent popularity of AI/ML/data science.

Python was hugely popular long before these were a thing. It was already seen as one of if not the most beginner friendly language at the beginning of the 2000s. It became the language of choice for ML because it was already popular with beginners not the other way round.

Yes, before Django there was Zope.

>> Java is popular due to the jvm

That's not how history played out at all. Java spent much of its life being pitched as a way to make C++ developers more productive.

The jvm was actively hated by many for years - slow startup times, excessive memory usage, it didn't used to enjoy the rich tooling ecosystem it has now and it was seen as opaque and hard to tweak for performance.

To this day it's not that hard to find Java devs who want off the hotspot jvm - whether that's to go onto other JVMs with different tradeoffs (Azul or whatever) or whether to go native compilation (GraalVM) instead.

I wrote another comment where I explained "popular due to jvm" better - the productivity gain was real, but came from the GC which was....JVM. No, the JVM wasn't hated initially - not until it became hugely popular and people started pushing it to the limit. Or well, at least that's how I remember the history, I might be wrong; human brains are notoriously fallible and I'm too lazy to search and validate/confirm my version of it :)