In August 2007, a few weeks after launching this site, I did something that still surprises me when I think about it: I emailed Guido van Rossum — the creator of Python and the language’s self-titled “Benevolent Dictator For Life” — to ask for advice on starting a Python User Group in the Philippines.
To my genuine shock, he replied. Quickly. With actual instructions on how to get it started.
That email led to a blog post called “Will Real Python Hackers Please Stand Up,” which became a rallying cry for Filipino Python enthusiasts. Comments trickled in from across the archipelago — a math professor from Ateneo de Manila teaching Python in discrete mathematics classes, a developer from Austin, Texas who was moving to Bohol and wanted to connect, a 17-year-old IT student eager to join. By May 2008, we had Pinoy PUG— the Pinoy Python User Group — up and running on Google Groups.
It was a tiny community. A handful of enthusiasts scattered across islands, connected by a shared interest in a programming language that most of the tech world was still ignoring.
That was 19 years ago. Today, Python is the most popular programming language on the planet.
The Numbers Are Absurd
Python currently holds the #1 position on the TIOBE Index with a 21.25% share as of March 2026 — nearly double the second-place language. It surpassed JavaScript to become the most-used language on GitHub. The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey shows 57.9% of respondents using Python, a 7-point jump from the previous year. It’s the most demanded language by recruiters worldwide. IEEE, RedMonk, PYPL — pick any ranking system you want. Python sits at or near the top of all of them.
When I was recommending Python books on this site in 2007, the language was ranked 7th on TIOBE. When I wrote about a Java developer’s experience switching to Python in 2008, Java was the undisputed king and Python was the quirky underdog that “serious” enterprise developers dismissed. When I published “How to Learn Python Quickly” in 2014, it was popular but still fighting for mainstream respect.
Now? Python doesn’t fight for anything. It is dominating.
What Happened? The short answer: AI happened.
The slightly longer answer: Python became the default language for every transformative technology of the past decade — machine learning, data science, deep learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and generative AI — and rode that wave from “popular scripting language” to “the most important programming language in the world.”
Every major AI framework is Python-first. PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, Hugging Face Transformers, LangChain, scikit-learn — the entire stack that powers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Stable Diffusion, and every other AI tool you’ve used was built in or interfaces primarily through Python. When researchers at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Meta AI publish a breakthrough paper, the reference implementation is almost always in Python. When a startup builds an AI product, the prototype is in Python. When a data scientist trains a model, the notebook is in Python.
The language that Guido van Rossum created in 1991 — designed to be readable, simple, and fun — turned out to be the perfect tool for the most complex technology humanity has ever built. There’s a beautiful irony in that. The language optimized for human readability became the language that teaches machines to think.
But AI alone doesn’t explain it. Python was already climbing before the ChatGPT era. Data science and the pandas/NumPy/Jupyter ecosystem had been pulling developers in for years. Web frameworks like Django and Flask powered major applications. DevOps and automation scripts ran on Python. It was the first language taught in many computer science programs because its syntax reads almost like English. The AI boom didn’t create Python’s dominance — it accelerated a trajectory that was already inevitable.
What I Got Right (And What I Missed)
Looking back at my old Python posts, I’m struck by how much I got right about the language’s potential and how completely I failed to predict the scale.
In 2007, when I emailed Guido and tried to build a Filipino Python community, I clearly believed the language was special. I wrote about it with the same evangelical enthusiasm I brought to Linux — another underdog technology that everyone underestimated. I recommended books on Python to my readers. I shared a Java developer’s “Pythonic experience” converting to the language. I saw something in Python’s simplicity and elegance that felt important.
What I didn’t predict was that Python would become the lingua franca of artificial intelligence, that it would dethrone JavaScript on GitHub, that it would command a quarter of the entire TIOBE index, or that knowing Python would become essentially mandatory for anyone working in tech. I thought it would grow. I didn’t think it would consume the world.
I also didn’t predict my own path. The guy who co-founded Pinoy PUG and evangelized Python eventually became an iOS developer writing Swift. I still use Python — for web scraping scripts, automation pipelines, data processing, and the backend work on my projects — but it’s no longer my primary language. The irony of abandoning my first love right before it became the most popular programming language in the world is not lost on me. It’s like selling Bitcoin at $500. Which, for the record, I also… let’s not go there.
Why Python?
Python’s dominance comes down to something I recognized back in 2007 but couldn’t articulate as clearly: it optimizes for the right thing.
Most programming languages optimize for the computer — speed, memory efficiency, type safety, compilation performance. Python optimizes for the human. It prioritizes readability over cleverness. It values simplicity over syntactic gymnastics. It lets you express complex ideas in fewer lines of code than virtually any alternative.
This design philosophy — which Guido baked into the language from day one — turned out to be the perfect match for an era where the bottleneck isn’t computing power (we have plenty) but human attention and talent (we don’t). When you need millions of people to learn programming quickly, when researchers need to prototype ideas before they know if they’ll work, when AI developers need to iterate on model architectures at breakneck speed — you need a language that gets out of the way and lets humans think. Python is that language.
It’s also why AI coding assistants love Python. GitHub Copilot, Claude, and every other AI code generation tool produces better Python than almost any other language, because Python’s clear syntax maps naturally to the training data. The language designed for human readability turned out to be optimally readable for machines too. A virtuous cycle: AI makes Python easier to write, Python makes AI easier to build.
The Guido Email, 19 Years Later
I sometimes think about that email exchange with Guido van Rossum. Here was a random Filipino blogger cold-emailing the creator of a programming language, asking for help starting a user group on a tropical island. And Guido — who at the time was working at Google, managing one of the most important open-source projects in the world — just… replied. With helpful advice. Because that’s what the open-source community does.
That moment captures everything I love about technology. The barriers are low. The community is generous. A kid from Bohol, Philippines can email the creator of a language that now powers artificial intelligence, and get a response.
Pinoy PUG may not have become the massive community I envisioned. But Python did become everything I hoped for the language and more. The math professor from Ateneo who commented on my 2007 post, wanting to teach Python to freshman students — that’s now happening at universities everywhere. The 17-year-old IT student who wanted to join our group — today’s 17-year-olds are learning Python as their first language, using it to build AI projects that would have been science fiction in 2007.
The language won. And in some small, perhaps insignificant way, I’m proud that TechSource was out there telling Filipinos to learn Python before most of the world had caught on.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some Python scripts to refactor. Nineteen years later, I’m still hacking.
— Jun