In short (all below is my opinion): it was popular in academia and got some corporate adoption, so when ML exploded in popularity it was a natural choice as the scripting language for ML tooling. On top of that it’s easy to pick up as a language, and it’s a general purpose language - there are lots of scientific tools like pandas written in it, there are web frameworks, etc.
Perl was too quirky for wide adoption and it stopped developing (Raku/Perl 6 took to long to develop), PHP was focused purely on the web, similarly JS. Ruby could have won, I like it more than Python, but outside of Japan it’s also mostly been associated with web development (because of Rails), it also lacked libraries that Python already had.
In short (all below is my opinion): it was popular in academia and got some corporate adoption, so when ML exploded in popularity it was a natural choice as the scripting language for ML tooling. On top of that it’s easy to pick up as a language, and it’s a general purpose language - there are lots of scientific tools like pandas written in it, there are web frameworks, etc.
Perl was too quirky for wide adoption and it stopped developing (Raku/Perl 6 took to long to develop), PHP was focused purely on the web, similarly JS. Ruby could have won, I like it more than Python, but outside of Japan it’s also mostly been associated with web development (because of Rails), it also lacked libraries that Python already had.