Python's popularity

[Luis M. González]

On Dec 22, 12:11 pm, walterbyrd <walterb... at iname.com> wrote:
> I have read that python is the world's 3rd most popular language, and
> that python has surpassed perl in popularity, but I am not seeing it.
>
> From what I have seen:
>
> - in unix/linux sysadmin, perl is far more popular than python,
> windows sysadmins typically don't use either.
> - in web-development, php is far more popular than python - it's not
> even close.
> - when I did a search on dice, I found over 20X more jobs advertised
> for ruby on rails developers, than for python dango developers.
> - application development is dominated by java, c/c++, and maybe a
> little visual basic.
> - as I understand it, fortran is still the most popular language for
> numberical programming.
>
> Of course, these are just observations on my part, nothing scientific
> about it. But, I can't help but wonder how python's popularity was
> determined. I suspect that a lot of people use python as a secondary
> skill. For example, I use ms-word, but I'm not an ms-word
> professional.
>
> Please note: I am not confusing popularity with quality. I am not
> saying that php is better for web-dev, or anything like that. I am
> just wondering how python is rated as being so popular, when python
> does not seem to dominate anything.


Sooner or later, we will remember those good old days where python was
our "secret sauce"...