suitability of python

[Rudra Banerjee]

Dear friends,
I am a newbie in python and basically i use python for postprocessing
like plotting, data manipulation etc.
Based on ease of programming on python I am wondering if I can consider
it for the main development as well. My jobs (written on fortran) runs
for weeks and quite CPU intensive. How python works on these type of
heavy computation? 
Any comment or reference is welcome.