Why Python?

[Wayne Folta]

    everything

But you were expecting that.

How about

    everything in every way in all situations

The bottom line is python is a clear, powerful language that has a 
great culture. You have a choice:

1. You want to learn the "perfect" language for each project at hand. 
Even if you're good at learning new languages -- as I think I am -- 
it's still going to take you a while to be idiomatic in the language 
instead of, say, programming perl in python.

Not to mention that finding the "perfect" language can take quite some 
time for each project. You'll have language advocates on each side of 
the issue. Is this project a natural fit for lisp? Oh, no, ruby's much 
more practical for this. Yes, but foobar has a package for doing 
exactly what you want. Blah, blah...

2. Learn a general-purpose language that can be easily used with many 
different paradigms (OO, functional, etc), has a good library set 
(network, math, etc), and has a flexible culture. This language should 
be reasonably well-known so you can find it widely, can find books on 
it, etc.

Some might say that perl 6 will be the epitome of #2, though my opinion 
is that perl will manage to implement #1 in a single language.

If you want to go with option #2, python's at the top of the list, in 
my opinion.

(Actually, there is a #3: you want to be highly marketable. Depending 
on where you want to work, the language de jour is likely to be C++, 
Java, or Visual Basic.)