I am going to disagree with the "it beats php, perl, R, and lots of things in readability and package coverage". PHP maybe, but Perl, R, etc. are quite readabl

I am going to disagree with the "it beats php, perl, R, and lots of things in readability and package coverage". PHP maybe, but Perl, R, etc. are quite readable. Often I find digging into others Python code, that it is written with a somewhat peculiar manner, making it difficult to reason about what the code is supposed to be doing. I'd recommend Julia (http://julialang.org http://julialang.org) for anyone looking at new projects where Python is an option. Similar syntax, though saner code structure (e.g. no tabs/spaces issues), compiled, strongly typed. All around an excellent language.