I remember the first time I was using gettext and wonder "wait, why do I have to switch the language for my whole program if I need it for just this request?" and realized that's because GNU gettext was made like that.
This even works across processes. The initial locale comes from environment variables, and you can’t generally rely on any particular values.
In fact, the “correct” values aren’t even portable. As far as I know, there is nothing resembling universal agreement on how to ask for what some systems call “C.UTF-8”. And, no offense to non-Americans, it’s fine [0] to spell one and one half “1,500”, but it is utterly broken to invoke this behavior by means of an environment variable that no one can quite agree on.
[0] OK, it really is ridiculous that the same string of Arabic numerals, commas and periods means different things in different places.
I'd say the switch was learning that Google Search was written in Python (remember when error pages URL were in .py ?), and Youtube rewritten in Python. After that, reddit and dropbox followed (and later Instagram).
Apple also added Python in, I think, Mac OS X Jaguar, so it blipped on the radar.
When you have big players using it, the community automatically grows.
Django was the continuity of that and definitely contributed to the growing popularity of Python, but I think the hype started way before (and in fact we had to suffer Zope/Plone/Twisted for it :)).
Another decisive date was circa 2010 when the Belgian book "learn programming with python" came out. Granted, Django was already 5 years old at the time, but it brought many beginners who knew nothing about programming at the time.
uv + ruff (for formatting AND linting) is a killer combo, though.
And the more you use uv, the most you discover incredible stuff you can do with it that kills so many python gotchas like using it in the shebang with inline deps or the wonders of "--with":
It's quite crazy, as Python first version was in 1991, 4 years before Java. It's a language with a ton of legacy baggage, the 2/3 transition, the BDLF being replaced by a completely different project leadership system, and it still keeps going strong.
This interview from Brett Cannon (old core dev who worked on packaging, imports, the vscode python extension...) is eye opening:
The guy cares SO MUCH and they have so many things not to break you can feel the sense of passion and the weight of responsibility in everything he says.
They removed friction by centralizing all restaurants so you can choose from one place, standardizing the experience no matter the food source, making selection simple and payment/refund easy.
The human brain is wired to go the way of the least resistance short term, no matter the cost long term, so customers pay a lot for that.
I have many pizza places that tell me they still deliver themselves for cheaper: almost nobody takes the option, they use the giant company app.
Another advantage of running claude inside a container is that you can use "--dangerously-skip-permissions" and let it do a thing in full autonomy for 2 hours. With a good prompt, abundant feedback like centralized logging and tests and a clear Claude.md, it can get pretty far on its own.
HN is a bubble, the world runs on "meh".