Python's popularity

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    Walter> From what I have seen:

    Walter> - in unix/linux sysadmin, perl is far more popular than python,
    Walter> windows sysadmins typically don't use either.
    Walter> - in web-development, php is far more popular than python - it's not
    Walter> even close.
    Walter> - when I did a search on dice, I found over 20X more jobs advertised
    Walter> for ruby on rails developers, than for python dango developers.
    Walter> - application development is dominated by java, c/c++, and maybe a
    Walter> little visual basic.
    Walter> - as I understand it, fortran is still the most popular language for
    Walter> numberical programming.

Looking at specific application domains doesn't tell the entire story.  If
you look back at the Tour de France results from the 80's I believe Greg
Lemond won it one year without ever winning a stage.  What you are reporting
is akin to that.  Fortran is almost certainly the king of numerical
programming, but Python might be #2 or #3 there (behind Matlab).  I'm pretty
sure it dwarfs Perl, PHP and Ruby in that domain.  In web development, while
PHP is more popular than Python, Python is probably much more popular than
Perl and Tcl.  Maybe not ahead of Ruby due to RoR.  etc etc.

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