The fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and the fact that the PSF puts a lot of its effort into community and outreach may well be connected.
> The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.
I don't think so. It has been a learning language for two+ decades, very easy to pick up yet still powerful, and growing. Add the recent decade+ boom in data to machine learning to AI (see other comment).
I'd be surprised if outreach activities reached a fraction of that impact. In the other direction, the poor packaging story has definitely hurt it's reputation. Not a single python post goes by without someone complaining about it.
Also protect is near the front of that statement. While a mission can be anything, it doesn’t make long term sense to look for new roommates when your foundation is crumbling.
> The fact that Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world and the fact that the PSF puts a lot of its effort into community and outreach may well be connected.
They may be, as any correlation might imply causation, but it would surprise me. Stack Overflow, great libraries (and their communities), all the data science/scientific computing open source work, the work to date on pypi, the lower barrier-to-entry syntax, as well as actual (C)Python improvements are the main things.
As an analogy, I've seen in previous companies that the HR believes they set the culture of the company, and they do things that attempt to improve the culture, but I'd still say that 99%+ of company culture is not coming from HR, except if it were extremely negative (e.g. Microsoft and stack ranking). Thankfully my more recent companies have understood this much more, which is wonderful.
Python is popular, because it's simple, and it's great as a glue language. The simplicity made it the language of choice for beginner's computer science courses at universities and schools. The glue language qualities led to numpy/scipy/et al., and that led to Python's popularity when AI/ML/data science became popular.
How much of the PSF's 2023 outreach budget was spent on those? How many universities were given money or otherwise convinced to redesign their curriculum using Python? Did it go to numpy?
> The mission of the Python Software Foundation is to promote, protect, and advance the Python programming language, and to support and facilitate the growth of a diverse and international community of Python programmers.