if the better languages were actually good, they wouldn't have allowed python to whip their asses. Python won because it was nice and easy. meet your users where they are, not where you want them to be.
That would be simplifying too much. There are a lot of external factors for something being popular, like timing, luck, support from big enterprises and leading colleges, inertia and sunk costs. You could argue that does make python better regardless of the language itself but that poster was talking about a hypothetical scenario in which those factors were won by a language better designed for those tasks. Would you use python if most libraries, docs and support were elsewhere just for the language design as is today?
Richard Feldman states in a video aiming to explain the popularity of OOP that Python initially had a small community for decades, and that Python's increase in popularity followed a slow and steady increase, which is not true of many other languages like Ruby. That's corroborated by the graph in this article. [0]
Based on Python's slow and steady incresae, timing and luck don't seem like good factors for explaining its popularity. The others are debatable though.
I fail to see how timing and luck isn't a factor. It's more than how popular it was when it launched, many of those languages that are allegedly better had a strong timing disadvantage by either not existing or not being mature once the data science boom occurred (including equivalents to libraries like numpy, scipy, matplotlib and theano), allowing python to be the right option then. Any language that missed the timing must now play catch up with a fraction of the resources and completely unproven in the market.
Luck is harder to quantify, but at the very least competitors like common lisp didn't have much of it.
Also, Python is where the "Rust Evangelism Strike Force" type stuff really started being a massive phenomenon.
Language wars have been forever, of course. But for a few years around 2010-ish, practically every single thread would have someone bringing up Python. If the post was about a tool, how the thing should have really been written in Python. If it was a how-to tutorial about a feature in another language, there would be a subthread about how Python undeniably does it better. Not occasionally, in a thread here and there - it was to the extent you couldn't miss it even if you wanted to. That's a kind of marketing that's proven effective in a forum like this, which is why it's being replicated by other languages now.
Python won in the data science/ML/AI crowds, and most of the hard work is being done by C code. In other industries, Python ranges from " successful with multiple contenders" (web) to "niche/unusable" (mobile and gaming).
