> My only question about the 2-tool combination is whether there are better combinations. Python has all the libraries and community support so any alternative

> My only question about the 2-tool combination is whether there are better combinations. Python has all the libraries and community support so any alternative would need similar. Maybe Node? Absolutely not. Python has a much more mature set of libraries which are much better designed, better tooling, and a much more reasonable type system, and the community has only recently begun to be polluted by Web 2.0 "move fast and break things" mentality. The Node ecosystem is built on that mentality, and while outlier developers at the front line of the JS community are able to be extraordinarily productive in JS/Node, developers building user-facing programs just get bogged down in breaking changes in dependencies, buggy and poorly-designed 0.x libraries, untraceable framework code that prioritizes configuration over convention, and intractable errors caused by a broken type system (this final issue is significantly improved in ES6). Source: Worked in Python 2.x for a few years, worked in Node for a few years, currently work in Python 3.x and Node (general design is to limit Node to compiling and testing the browser-based part of our product). JS/Node is maybe 20% of our code, 20% of our features, 50% of our dev time, and 80% of our bugs.