EDIT: Python is my favorite language. But I wish a LOT more very lazy people or people who can't apply algorithms to solve their own problems (and hopefully in

EDIT: Python is my favorite language. But I wish a LOT more very lazy people or people who can't apply algorithms to solve their own problems (and hopefully in all the same domains that I work in) used it, discussed and asked questions, etc. It is in this vein that I write... "Python is popular enough to have a critical mass of users" - on this point unfortunately I have to disagree. Often the way I write a script is to put in a little extra effort up-front: I do three or four Google searches with the hard part of the task + Python, Perl, PHP, etc -- just to see if someone has already done this for me. I must say that if it's something hard and remotely web-related, the Python part is usually not even worth trying. Either I can do it off of the top of my head, or some fool is asking how to do this thing they can do in PHP in Python and, well, not really getting an answer. (It's not that it's wrong to code things up the long way, it's just that, like I said, it's not even worth doing the Google search). In this sense there is not a 'critical mass' of users. Let me give you a simple example. Say you want to do fancy appointment-matching like people saying "next friday"...you want to try to pick up on that and offer to set an appointment. So, Google "appointment regular expression next friday php" "apppointment regular expression next friday python" "appointment regular expression next friday perl". You can go ahead and do it, I don't even have to check. If you don't find anything, play around for less than 15 seconds with alternate search terms (more general, more specific, or just different.) I did the above search just now, and in my case I went off on this tangent and within a couple of minutes had an answer that was satisfactory for me. I would say, well, there are simply lots of fast scripts that you KNOW can take you 2-3 days of head-scratching to get right OR that the community already has bumped their heads against. Which do you do? If you're NASA, of course you go through scratching your head and getting the RIGHT answer. If you're trying to get a demo out the door, then you go for the low-hanging fruit, with as much leaning on the community as possible. Of course, if its creation, trajectory calculations, whatever, involve a scripting language in any way, would I want a rocket to use Python over PHP. But if I need a script that creates a GIF file of a rocket blasting off off-screen, based on a static image of the rocket that I have? (Forget whether the gif is the correct solution, I just want to see what it looks like, maybe as part of investigating lots of possible ways to do this). Well, then I would do a couple of minutes of Googling first... (As above, though I didn't try this one). Usually, I'm sorry to say, Python doesn't win. If this get smore downvotes I'll try the Python search on creating a gif file programmatically.