Why Python?

For long I have been wondering "Why Python?" - why is python gaining popularity? Why do many prefer python for all sorts of work? Myself being a Java fan (some of my friends say fan-atic) it makes it more interesting to me to understand the reason behind its uprising.

I am a software engineer mainly working on enterprise systems with Java. One of my hobby is to write scripts for anything that I (might) have to repeat in near future. I usually prefer shell scripting for writing scripts. But for some particular tasks, like converting seconds to ISO8601 formatted date string, multi-threaded http request and response handling with file i/o; I needed something extra for these as shell script was becoming overly complicated.

From all the buzz about Python I said myself let me give it a shot and check it out. I have to admit that I was astounded, stupefied , awed at how simple and powerful it was to achieve all that I needed for my use case. It took me just about to 3 hours to get Python 2.5, IDLE installed and write my first 2 programs which the do the following tasks-

1. Take seconds as input from command line argument and print its ISO8601 equivalent.
2. Take URLs as input and take 'n' samples for their response-time and total duration while all URLs should perform these tasks in parallel.

Not only have I learnt new languages earlier, I was also a Lab Instructor and Teaching Assistant for programming courses, from my experience to say that I will get these things done within 2 hours without having even read ANY article on Python or knowing nothing about it in the past, I have to say that its awesome (Please let me know if you feel I was slow). It was down to simplicity of the language compounded with fluent syntax and excellent documentation. Within the time mentioned I learnt and used Objects, Collections, Classes, Control flows (if, for), Exception handling, File I/O and Threads. If you are interested to checkout what I achieved you can checkout them out here.

From what I read later, I learnt that its equally simple to build UIs with Python and with some Googling I learnt of Google App Engine, which just makes developers life easy (at least thats what its there for).

I plan to do more work Python in near future and learn it and master it. If you have not yet tried Python, then I recommend to do ASAP and enjoy it.....