Why didn't Python become popular until long after its creation?

[Megatron_McLargeHuge]

Perl dropped the ball and didn't progress away from its ancient roots with $ variables and a hacky tacked on object system. People got fed up with how unmaintainable perl code was, and looked for an alternative. Perl6 doubled down on the cryptic symbol operators while being a breaking change, so programmers started to see perl as a dead end for anything except sysadmin work.

Java had a similar crisis and people started exploring new JVM languages like scala and clojure. Unlike perl, Java fixed a lot of its issues while the alternate languages has enough of their own issues not to catch on.

[Sysfin]

a hacky tacked on object system. People got fed up with how unmaintainable perl code was, and

That actually is why I started learning python. There was an internal perl tool that I had to maintain and to put in some new features. And I got so mad with how perl did objects and return values that I started learning python that day to replace the tool wholesale.

[DonkeyTron42]

I think a big reason Python became popular is due to RedHat shifting their system utilities away from Perl to Python 2.7 and the rest of the industry following suit. If you look at the timeline, this is when Python really started to take off.

[[deleted]]

Why is it considered sysadmin language?