Python

As I wrote extensively earlier, I'm not fully satisfied with either Perl or Ruby for my main programming language of choice. I always knew there is the third option, Python, but for some reason never paid any serious attention to it.

Well, this is about to change - I've decided to give Python a try. What gave me the push was two things:

• I was playing with wxWidgets earlier this week - it's a really nice cross-platform GUI framework. I've used the Perl binding - wxPerl, for a toy project in the past but wasn't entirely happy with it (with wxPerl, not wxWidgets). Well, while reading the new wxWidgets docs I saw wxPython mentioned as the best binding around, and some web browsing confirmed it. So, Python may be just what I was looking for in terms of a good native-widget GUI framework binding to a high-level language.
• A few days ago I've read a blog post about Sage - a mathematics software suite based on Python that provides an alternative to Matlab. Python has a lot of scientific computing packages, like SciPy and NumPy, and Sage seems to be a clever aggregate of Python with these and numerous other modules suitable for number crunching and plotting. This looks very interesting.

So, I've installed the ActivePython distribution on my Windows computer and already read a few chapters of "Dive into Python". It's too early to form impressions - but I will definitely have more to say on the subject during the next few days.