newbie: good reasons for learning Python?

[Jiwon Seo]

"somaBoyMX" <nosuch at fakemail.net> wrote in message news:<3ef37a28$0$306$ba620e4c at reader0.news.skynet.be>...
> Hiya,
> 
> 
> I've been checking out some Python tutorials on the web, it looks cool
> enough. I'm already fairly good at JavaScript, ActionScript and PHP and now
> I'd like to tackle Python. However, I still need to be convinced before I
> decide to dedicate my precious free time to this. So I'd like to hear some
> convincing arguments for Python.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> 
> .soma

To answer your question properly, one would need some more information
about what you want from learning python, but I think I can safely
assume that you just want to learn new language to extend your
intellectual horizon. In that case, python has many good points.

Python is good language to learn paradigms. It has support for
functional programming, higher order programming, generators, etc,
which some languages does not support. So, you can learn these
paragigms easily from python, probably much more easily than from
java.

Python is also good for its clean syntax. They omitted needless
brackets, and forced the use of indentation. The motto of python is
"There is always one obvious way to do it", and many try to follow
that motto. So, you can learn some brevity from reading python code.

Python is rapidly developing language, and you can see many concepts
coming into it, and from which you can learn something, too. Just
watching carefully what has come to python and what has changed gives
you much inspiration.

Python is a good language to broaden your knowledge. Go and learn it.