If you need a programming language for you job, but you're not primarily a developer, and two languages would probably be overkill, then your one language is probably python.

That's a lot of people.

That’s exactly how I chose Python.

I'm curious, what was the job that needed some code but not a dedicated developer?

I'm taking computational biology courses on the side, so that's the application that comes to mind for me.

I do digital marketing for clients. There’s a large number of activities that can be made more efficient, quicker, cheaper, or better using code.

For example taking a large number of text documents and turning them into video outlines with illustrations using OpenAI APIs and a quick and dirty Django app to organise everything.

Or connecting up various marketing APIs using Python instead of Zapier - a lot of companies spend thousands of dollars on Zapier each month when a script would literally cost a dollar to run.

Python is just fastest to write. No semicolons, fewer parens, no braces, no const / var / let. List / dict / set comprehensions. Lambdas are clunkier, but `def` is shorter than `function`. Etc.

Perl and Ruby are comparably compact and expressive, but relatively few people know Ruby, end even fewer people know Perl, especially among those younger than 50.

BTW Haskell is also syntactically compact and expressive; I once solved a toy interview problem using it. But even fewer people know it at a practical level, among interviewees and interviewers alike.

I’m proficient and confident in many languages because I like solving problems with computers. However in a high-stakes and low-tooling situation like a job interview I wouldn’t choose JavaScript any day of the week because of the uncertainty, inconsistency, and footguns it likes to sprinkle everywhere.

There is absolutely a role for JavaScript, it truly does run everywhere which is no small feat. But that’s about all it’s good at.

What I’m getting at is that when you give people a choice they are going to optimize for the scenario, so you have a heavy selection bias in your anecdote.

Is it a recruiting company, as it's main business is to recruit candidates ? Or was the core business something else and you were recruiting devs for it ?

I think it's always difficult to get the bigger picture of the dev market through candidates. Many (rightfully) handle their career moves by themselves and will directly apply to companies that fit them, heavily biasing the movement observed from the company or third party recruiters.

Main business is (was) recruiting people for roles all over the place.

Maybe a lot of things start in Python, because so many people know it, and no one wants to change languages after a project starts?

Python also has a very wide range of applications so while there are many languages more popular in a particular area, Python is extremely widely used in aggregate. By contrast it is unusual to write numerical code in PHP or web apps in C.

According to Stack Overflow JavaScript is more popular.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023#section-most-popular-te...

Python seems to be popular for solving leetcode style interview questions, which might be something worth of note.

I could probably say "you're moving the goalposts here, I'm taking all developers not all working developers" or something, but I think these days you're basically correct. Python was relatively more niche when I picked it up in 2009 or so, but it's really become the lingua franca of our industry.