Actually most astronomers and physicists I know are already moving toward Python. Coming from a mixed particle physics and astronomy experiment, almost all our

Actually most astronomers and physicists I know are already moving toward Python. Coming from a mixed particle physics and astronomy experiment, almost all our tools are written in Python for researchers, but usually with ROOT (C++, http://root.cern.ch/ http://root.cern.ch/ ) underneath. ROOT is python friendly. SciPy/NumPy, PyROOT, PyFITS are all unbeatable tools for anything in Physics or Astronomy as far as I'm concerned. Throw some knowledge of C in with that, and you can scale anything up to supercomputing clusters or back down to your laptop, and that's a very important, powerful thing for a scientist.