I've recently discovered the world of Python. I started looking at it after I discovered the Chandler project was using it to essentially clone Microsoft Outlook and read a rave about it by Eric Raymond entitled Why Python? I also discovered a cool project called SchoolTool also using it. This has got me curious about other recent languages like Ruby but Python looks like it's ready to take off.
It seems to be the language of choice for the Open Source community writing rich clients. It's completely open source (unlike Java) and it's much more productive than that old standby, C++. There are some great libraries available for it, particularly wxPython. It's cross platform and the langauge is modern and fully object-oriented. So far so good.
I've installed Python 2.3.2, wxPython, Python Windows Extensions and Boa-Constructor in order to start trying out the tutorial. Unfortunately, coming from Microsoft-land I'm pretty spoiled with tools and while it's nice that Boa-Constructor is visual, it doesn't compare with Visual Studio.
It's not clear to me yet about how well Python can play in the dotNet world. There is Visual Python but it's relatively expensive and I'm not sure how good it is. There's this experimental version but if you read the accompanying whitepaper, you discover how hard it is to map the semantics of Python to the the dotNet common type system. It's quite clear that dotNet is designed for languages that are statically typed. Python is dynamically typed. The type is associated with the value rather than the reference. There are other features that look hard to map as well such as multiple inheritance.
Even if you map the semantics well, there will be issues with how well it can work with other dotNet languages and what do you do about the Python libraries? The libraries are one of Python's key strengths and would need porting. It's unlikely you could consider Python to be trusted code. So Python doesn't look like it will play in the dotNet world very easily although I'm very intrigued by IronPython being written by Jim Hugunin. There is hope yet. I need to take a deeper look.
It does seem like Python is a killer platform in it's own right. I'll have more to say once I get through the language tutorial. If you're now curious about Python, check out these guides or the samples in this cookbook. I like the syntax!