Short answer: for an experienced JS developer, choose Python over JS if your application falls into Python’s areas of excellence (data science/ML, system automa

Short answer: for an experienced JS developer, choose Python over JS if your application falls into Python’s areas of excellence (data science/ML, system automation, graphic pipelines, gaming engines) and if you have the time to learn it (Python is generally easier to learn than JS). For other applications like web development, it’s likely not worth switching to Python for an experienced JS developer. Raw curiosity and experimentation is always a good reason, Python is the 3rd most loved language by developers according to StackOverflow. —— Long answer From experience the python ecosystem is great when it comes to analyzing data, data science, machine learning. Previously the alternatives for data science were R/Matlab/Octave which are languages designed by/for mathematicians primarily - while python is a general-purpose language. These languages tend to perform slower than Python. A more recent alternative is Julia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language). Another interesting example is this online community offering live backtesting of algorithmic trading strategies written in Python is Quantopian: https://www.quantopian.com/algorithms/ https://www.quantopian.com/algorithms/ Some notable libraries which build on each other are scipy (http://www.scipy.org http://www.scipy.org), numpy (http://www.numpy.org http://www.numpy.org), pandas (http://pandas.pydata.org http://pandas.pydata.org), scikit-learn (https://scikit-learn.org https://scikit-learn.org), google's tensorflow. Tools like iPython/Jupyter (https://ipython.org https://ipython.org) act somewhat like an IDE in the data analyst's workflow. It Other popular use cases for python: system programming and automation as an alternative to shell/perl scripts because the python interpreter ships with most linux distributions by default while other scripting language do not. This use case is especially popular at Google where Python's creator and "benevolent dictator for life" Guido van Rossum had been working for 7 years. Examples of such applications built in python include Ansible, Docker-compose. Yet another application where Python is popular is gaming engines (Pygame, Panda3D). Python is also the de-facto language for graphic pipelines and interoperability between 3D applications in the media and entertainment industry. It is supported directly in the Unreal Engine and Maya. According to this Quora page, a Google Engineer uses python for build/test/deployment automation, some monitoring and service configuration tasks, Tensorflow configuration and results analysis. Other answers mention python used in much of the Youtube codebase. https://www.quora.com/What-is-Python-used-for-at-Google https://www.quora.com/What-is-Python-used-for-at-Google Python is also a good option to write a REST API server really quickly using the flask-restful library. https://codeburst.io/this-is-how-easy-it-is-to-create-a-rest-api-8a25122ab1f3 https://codeburst.io/this-is-how-easy-it-is-to-create-a-rest... Further reading https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python https://stxnext.com/blog/2018/10/16/python-vs-nodejs-comparison/ https://stxnext.com/blog/2018/10/16/python-vs-nodejs-compari... https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-dreaded-and-wanted https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2018/#most-loved-d... https://hackernoon.com/could-pythons-popularity-outperform-javascript-in-the-next-five-years-abed4e307224 https://hackernoon.com/could-pythons-popularity-outperform-j... https://www.quora.com/What-are-advantages-and-disadvantages-of-Python https://www.quora.com/What-are-advantages-and-disadvantages-...