Python is 5/6 years older and it was developed in Europe, not in Japan (it took a few years for western programmers to get Ruby)
Python has been in use in academia for a very long time (way before the recent surge of ML and data science)
A lot of financial software uses/used Python to wrap C and C++ numerical libraries because of how easy it is
Python was faster for a while (don't know which one is right now, I guess they are more or less the same)
SciPy
Google picked Python a long time ago as one of what were informally called the three languages they supported (C++, Java and Python). It even employed a few members of the core team for a while. They even tried to "fork" Python at some point with the intent to make it faster (that's a nice story in itself :D)
These are few of the reasons why Python gained more popularity in the first 10 years of their existence. Then Rails and YARV came :-D
Ah ah you want to start a flame war :D
I think it's a bunch of reasons added together:
These are few of the reasons why Python gained more popularity in the first 10 years of their existence. Then Rails and YARV came :-D
Ok, these are pretty valid arguments, I take it.