NEWBIE: Confussed about Python!

[Bill Tate]

"Max Adams" > 4)  What is python commonly used for?

Max,
There is a certain pony-tailed individual of Python notoriety, whom
I've had the pleasure of working with for a year.  This particular
individual currently resides in certain town along the Maine coast
where he has the unfortunate burden of having to be careful when he
steps out into his yard for fear of getting trampled by some male
moose in heat.  Anyway, this particular individual was responsible for
coding mission critical software (in Python). I can't begin to tell
you what an advantage it is to be able to view code as clean,
maintainable and as decipherable as this individual's code was.  That
was due in no small part to the power and elegant syntax of Python.

I would contrast this against the work of a particular PERL developer
named Garth - his true name.  Garth seemed to adhere to the seemingly
characteristic PERL axiom - "I can code that in one line." 
Unfortunately, Garth - quite talented as a C++ programmer as well -
was urgently needed elsewhere and the responsibility of maintaining
his "elegant" PERL code fell upon the rest of the development team. 
As you might imagine, the first reaction amongst all of us was to
"ditch" this code in favor of something that actually could be
maintained and extended.

I think, on the whole, you will find the technical merits of Python
stand on their own quite well. But, just as important I believe,
Python is a outstanding choice from a business perspective as well.  I
think you will find that Python fits today's (and future) business
model extremely well.  Is a business person more likely to care more
about tools that actually help give them a competitive advantage or
are they likely to prefer wasted cycles on the part of the development
team engaging in a robust debate about which language more closely
adheres to "OO dogma" or the pros/cons of braces vs. indentation?  The
latter being a genuinely important and value-added business activity. 
Personally, I imagine that a business person would welcome a major
rewrite of code every time a new developer joins the team and who
advocates a more "robust" solution.  Better yet, employing a
development language that "works" for you rather than against you.  Of
course, why would any business care about ease of code maintenance or
the ability to extend the code base?  Of course, throwing out code is
always a productive contribution to the bottom line as well.  Oh yeah
- and then there's that little issue of about the cost of doing
things?  Forgive the sarcasm but I've seen too many wasted,
unproductive cycles that have done more harm to businesses than good. 
That is not something I've ever seen as a result of using Python.