I think Python is an excellent choice for people transfering their know-how from other platforms (e.g. Linux) to Windows. The win32* libraries (as installed on

I think Python is an excellent choice for people transfering their know-how from other platforms (e.g. Linux) to Windows. The win32* libraries (as installed on a stock ActivePython .msi install) allow you to automate a lot of the windows platform, including a lot of the native api, implementing or controlling services, babysitting/killing/restarting windows tasks, talking to office applications, odbc databases, ... and I used it quite a lot to do automation tasks involving all these things. Python is a very nice glue-language, not only on Linux. And I've used it to much advantage on Windows. I've - talked to lab-equipment using provided .dlls (using ctypes) or serial ports (using py-serial) - talked to other applications via OLE (querying some windows-only document management system and retrieving data, querying Excel to get data out, remote-controlling Word to fill in forms) to interface with the Windows-only crowd that is prevalent in big corporations. - accessed databases over odbc ...and had most of my Unix-based tools, scripting know-how and methods (talking over network-sockets, using urllib, ascii-files, regular expressions) available to me, without resorting to ugly .bat-files, vb-script or vba. Also I did some rudimentary UI development using wxpython. I normally prefer coding under Linux, too, but I have to say, python under windows was not unpleasant at all.