When somebody says “scripting language”, people probably tend to either think Perl or PHP…

With Perl, I have always been put down by it’s “many ways to do a task” ideology and the write-only code it produces. And with scripting languages such as PHP: they tend to be either too web-centric, and/or have grown too big for my taste. A good, general purpose scripting language just seems hard to come by these days.

I need a toolset with tools that are specific in function, easy to learn/use; and not a bloated hack with everything and the kitchen sink thrown in. But rather something that is concrete [as in not loose], something that will do the job it was designed for, and something that is established and has matured in a good way.

And here comes Python out of the blue. A good article about ESR trying this language and finding it easier to learn, use, and to be more productive in over Perl…

Why Python?

Haskell and Lisp are also some other interesting options, though I’m not sure how easy they are to learn.

Dive Into Python is an online book that has come highly recommended.

Byte of Python is another online book [in the form of a wiki] that gets to the point.