Python is both one of the fastest growing programming languages and the second-most popular one overall. It's open source, so anybody can download and get started with it, and it's high-level enough that it's easy for beginners to pick up. It's frequently used for tasks around web development, data science, and artificial intelligence.
"We often find that while Python isn't people's primary language, it was a lot of people's second language," Rachel Potvin, GitHub's vice president of engineering and data, said onstage at GitHub Universe on Wednesday. "There's something else behind the uptake in Python which is this explosion of the work in data science and machine learning."