Other than that, you can do many amazing things using python. From desktop application development, web development, game development to complex tasks like Machine Learning, data science, computer vision etc. can be easily done in python. There are many new types of research going on in the field of self-driving cars, image recognition, smart recommendation feeds, Natural Language processing etc. using python which means if you learn python, you'll be able to land yourself in programming industry easily.
I am a research programmer myself and I am currently working on the site http://www.python36.com/ to make quality tutorials of python available for free. I have just started and it's still in the beginning phase but keep updated so that you can learn more from there. Cheers!!!
In the 1970s and 1980s most computers came with their own version of BASIC because it was easy to use and learn. BASIC was mostly on 8-bit computers unless they had some sort of DOS and then BASIC was an add-in they loaded in the DOS.
Python is easy to learn and use, but can get complex with libraries, etc. You have to find the right libraries to use to do things, like Beautiful Soup to scrape websites, etc.
Python exists for many platforms as BASIC and Pascal and C/C++ and Java do, but Python seems to be popular with web developers and hackers to build websites out of.