Python was obscure and developed in silence for 15 years before it caught on. The team behind it just never gave up. Most people who develop independent languages give up after a year or five. Lua is similar, though it and PHP both caught on faster because they both put embedding upfront, which allowed them to be built into game engines and websites built with C.
Python also fits its design space amazingly well (that's what's meant by "Guido's time machine"). It's a glue language, with a REPL, but it's not a shell (i.e. it's not meant to glue programs primarily through stdin/stdout/argv, but instead libraries through their APIs). It was a very useful (Greenspun's tenth rule) and somewhat underserved niche (perl, scheme and tcl come to mind).
I know this is a really late reply, but your comment says ‘[i]t was a …’. Was that just an odd choice of tense or are you arguing that Python is no longer useful for its niche? If so, and I’m genuinely asking, is there a replacement for the glue language aspect that retains Pythons wide standard library approach?
I think your recollection of Python is a bit off. Python wasn't really obscure or developed in silence. If you needed a glue language for a unix system, then there were really only three choices: Perl 5, TCL/tk, and Python.
If you worked in a career where you needed a glue language, then you were at the very least aware that Python existed.
