Well, I know I'm preaching to the converted - but Python rocks. I've been enchanted by the siren calls of Scheme, Lisp and Forth, but in the end, I find Python much easier. I even tried a little bit of Tcl.
To give a bit of context ... I have recently switched from Windows to OS X and Linux. I missed MS Money, but couldn't get on with GnuCash. So I decided to write my own little home-brew money management program that includes things like downloading share price info from Yahoo Finance. I picked Chicken Scheme for OS X. Things started well, and even the web download and regex stuff worked fairly painlessly. I wanted to work with dates, and decided that I needed the SRFI-19 library. Chicken has "eggs", which you can download and install. The problem is that it needed further dependencies. Well, no need to panic just because of that; but I found that it ultimately depended on gmp, which turned out a pain to compile. Other languages seem to have neat ideas; like closures or macros in Scheme, or ultra-simple syntax like Forth. But what I have generally found is that other languages seem to require too much pain for too little return. I just seem to be way more productive in Python than in any other language. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
