meh. I’m not trying to sound cultish, but if you’re not at least familiar with some of the packages I mentioned... Python is different than TCL. Python isn’t growing in popularity for nothing. At the end of the day, I just want tools that get out of my way, while keeping the loc I’m responsible for maintaining to be small and easy to grok.

Python is growing in fashion because those Fortran and C++ GPGPU libraries happen to have Python bindings out of the box, whereas other languages are only getting them now.

That and has replaced Java in many introduction to programming courses.

Which is good, when learning to programm performance isn't a concern as such.

I know Python since Zope was the only reason to use it, so around Python 1.5 or something.

Other than replacing what I used Perl for, regarding UNIX shell scripting, I never used Python in any scenario where performance might come into play.

There are plenty of options that beat Python's LOC, while providing an AOT/JIT toolchain out of the box.