Programming in Python

A couple of days ago I started looking at Python (www.python.org) to try and build some clever plumbing on my server.  My initial thoughts are extremely favourable:

• Syntactically easy to pick-up: If you have used a programming language and especially a scripting language like Perl before, this will be an easy transition.
• Great community: Documentation on an open source project depends on having a great community of users and developers and this is true of python.
• Wide support: Support for databases and different operating systems is there

The real test is in the ability to use not a lot of code to achieve a lot -- and python is excellent for this.  As for comparisons for perl; I don't have enough experience to make a call here, but I would say that outside of shell programming, I would probably prefer python (although on saying that, if you have more experience in a particular language, it'll always be your preferred tool anyway).

Pak