There is an article on oreilly.net's OnLamp site called "The World's Most Maintainable Programming Language" (http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2006/03/the_worlds_most_maintainable_p.html).
It's not about a specific language, but about the qualities that would make up the title language (learnability, consistency, simplicity, power, enforcing good programming practices). I thought this might be of interest to some of you, and I thought I'd point out the two places where Python was mentioned: from Part 4, Power: "Of course (second point), a language that requires users to extend it to be productive has already failed, unless it can enforce that there is one obvious solution to any problem and autonomously subsume the first working solution into the core language or library. Python is a good example of this practice. There is a strong polycultural subcommunity in the world of free and open source, and the members of this group consider the lack of competing projects in Python (one XML parser, one logging library, one networking toolkit) to be counterintuitive and even counter to the goal of language progress. They’re wrong; this is actually a strong force for cohesion in the language and community, where the correct answer to a novice’s question of “How can I parse XML?”, “How can I publish a database-driven web site?”, or even “How can I integrate the legacy system of an acquired company from a different industry with our existing legacy system?” (to prove that this principle does not only apply to small or toy problems) is usually “Someone else has already implemented the correct solution to that problem — it is part of the standard library.”" from Part 5, Enforcing Good Programming Practices: "Having a comprehensive standard library helps alleviate this problem to some degree for many languages. Consider how PHP and Java have both avoided the trouble of conflicting addons by aggressively integrating new features into the language. (Of course, Python has done a similar job through a rigorous set of community procedures, but that’s difficult — though not impossible — to emulate in a parser and compiler.)" -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
