Ruby and Python syntax are quite different. Ruby syntax seems designed to be difficult to learn. It uses obtuse, non-standard, irregular syntax for common ope

Ruby and Python syntax are quite different. Ruby syntax seems designed to be difficult to learn. It uses obtuse, non-standard, irregular syntax for common operations, requiring constant consultation of the manual for the beginner to see any non-trivial program as anything other than line noise. For reasons I do not really understand, Ruby is quite popular with HN users and I may actually receive downvotes for what I've said so far. Python's syntax, by contrast, is simple, intuitive, and fairly standard. Python does have a few innovations over other languages -- the most important that come to mind are indentation-delimited blocks [1], tuple unpacking, list comprehensions, generators, args/kwargs, and access operator overloading. All of these are usually optional in your own code and easy to grok when you seem in others' code. When you are ready to use these syntax elements, you will find them easy to learn and quite practical in a variety of situations. Python code can be concise without being unreadable. This greatly improves developer productivity, which is very important. Most projects are bottlenecked by developer time. Python is a truly general purpose programming language, with excellent library support. People can and do use it for command-line utilities, web applications [2], math/science [3], and desktop applications [4]. [1] Using indentation to delimit blocks is a controversial "innovation" of Python. I suggest suspending judgment until you've written at least one medium-sized program in Python. As a matter of coding style, usually programs written in high-level languages also use indentation to denote blocks; when this indentation gets out of sync with the rules the language actually uses to delimit blocks, you can get hard-to-spot bugs like this one: if (myflag); myFunction(); This will compile, but the if statement is a no-op, and myFunction() will always be called, which is probably not what the author intended. The above bug cannot happen in Python; since Python actually uses indentation to determine blocks, by definition the indentation cannot get out of sync with the way the compiler/interpreter sees your code. [2] For Python webapp development, I recommend writing a simple webapp with Flask first, then adding sqlalchemy for proper database support. Once you're comfortable with that combination, you'll want to switch to Django. [3] Try Sage, IPython, numpy, and scipy. [4] I recommend GTK+ for desktop apps, especially on Linux. http://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/ http://python-gtk-3-tutorial.readthedocs.org/