speed and ease of development (weak typing, behavior based instead of class based)
interpreted - introspection
documentation is part of the language
good code reads like a novel ( and i dislike a lot of curly braces in the novel i read, i like readable syntax).
highlevel access to a lot of things (datastructures, I/O, databases)
lowlevel access to a lot of things if you really want to
snippets and code all over. well written books. large community
functional programming if you want to
procedural programming if you want to
object oriented programming if you want to
did i mention web2py is written in python? could be enough reason
python applies to nearly every field. no need to learn a different language if you occasionally dip into some other field of IT
batteries included
congruent and consistent in a lot of places, while allowing you to have the freedom to choose otherwise (think of dictionary like interfaces, operator overloading etc)
mature - it's been here for a loooong time (wikipedia: First appeared 1991; 24 years ago)
Everything is an object (while not forcing you to write oop yourself)
Following are the features which made me love python:
Forced indentation (This makes code look cleaner and understandable)
Weak typing (no need of variable data types when declaring)
A large collection of supported libraries(Let it be from scripting to app development, from web development to distributed computing, from Big data to scientific computing.. Python is everywhere)
Works on multiple environment.. Even with embedded systems
Remco Boerma
CTO@NPO, python dev, dba