Interesting, particularly as Facebook and Twitter are not particularly known for their use of Python. Google uses Python extensively, and I'm not sure about Spotify.
Could this be due to the popularity of Python among data-scientists?
Yap Spotify uses Python. They had few talks at RocketSpace in SF on their use of Python and Big Data analysis. Big Data has definitely helped with Python uptake. There are many great packages for scientific computing with Python like SciPy, NumPy et al.
Not sure why is it the most demanded, but i know quite a lot of people who started learning programming with Python. It is the second most recommended language after JS to start programming, this view is also reinforced by many MOOC as well.
What do you think is so special about Python that it appeared four times in the list of 100 "most sought-after employers in the World", as LinkedIn put it, as one of the top three skills in demand?
Lots of programmers at Google, Facebook, Twitter and Spotify have Python on their "skills" lists which can house anything you want with any level of experience or none at all, and any or no relevance to your current job.
We're never told these are the top three skills, or the top three skills "in demand" at those companies, in all likeliness Python simply "won the lottery" for no significant reason other than to provide some variation or just to attract pageviews from another demographic.
The top skills were likely hand-curated given that VMWare, Oracle, Microsoft and Apple all got no programming languages in their shortlists despite having an ungodly amount of software on the market. The top skills at any company with 5 or 6 digits of employees is probably variations of "customer support".
At the bottom it says "our analyst weighted actions like viewing employee profiles, visiting company pages and following companies" which means the entire thing is a black box of essentially random, big companies that use LinkedIn.
Could this be due to the popularity of Python among data-scientists?