That's a fascinating wrong way to look at history. Python has no specializing. It always played strong on many popular fields.
From the early days, it had a strong leaning to science, after all that's where it came from. But at the same time it also had a strong stance in unix-areas and established itself as a good tool for sysadmins, competing with perl and bash. And at the same time it also had strong bindings with other languages, gave it early on the fame of a glue-language. It also dabbled early in Web-Stack and networks and had to many web-stack-option to gain that "one framework"-fame, like ruby on rails.
Python just was the language which allowed you to play on on all the important fields, with simplicity, even with some level of speed. This was something other languages lacked. They either were complicated, or slow, or lacking support for specific areas. Python just somehow acquired them all, and had a big impact on a broad area, which made it so popular, because for the majority of usecases it was a natural option.
From the early days, it had a strong leaning to science, after all that's where it came from. But at the same time it also had a strong stance in unix-areas and established itself as a good tool for sysadmins, competing with perl and bash. And at the same time it also had strong bindings with other languages, gave it early on the fame of a glue-language. It also dabbled early in Web-Stack and networks and had to many web-stack-option to gain that "one framework"-fame, like ruby on rails.
Python just was the language which allowed you to play on on all the important fields, with simplicity, even with some level of speed. This was something other languages lacked. They either were complicated, or slow, or lacking support for specific areas. Python just somehow acquired them all, and had a big impact on a broad area, which made it so popular, because for the majority of usecases it was a natural option.