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"My hope is that python will serve as a "gateway drug" to other languages like ruby, ML, C/C++, SQL"

Your inclusion of SQL in that list really shows you have no idea what you're talking about.

SQL certainly is a programming language. It is a member of the declarative family of languages (eg. like Regular Expressions, or Prolog), rather than an imperative/procedural one.

SQL is immensely successful.

Yea, so is HTML, but if someones list of useful programming languages went C#, HTML, ruby, SQL. You would have to admit too that you would consider that person very inexperianced. It’t like listing a blender in a list of your favorite power tools. It’s not that it’s not useful for what it does, it just doesn’t belong in that particular comparison.

SQL stands for standardized query language.

It was originally SEQUEL (Structured English Query Language) and then changed to SQL (Structured Query Language) due to acronym conflict with Hawker Siddeley's trademark.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQL#History

>> Also, python wants to be everything ( functional, OO, imperative, etc ) and hence is the worst language to learn programming language topics in my humble opinion.

I think it doesn't get the functional/imperative parts right as they seem to be patched onto it. It is just a scriptable, OO language and pretty good at it, when combined with it's batteries included et al.

OTOH, Common Lisp is everything and is great at it. IMHO, a language with only paradigm is very restrictive and rarely helps when solving real world problems as they can't be effectively modeled in one paradigm only.

That is why CL is just a joy to solve problems with. So is Python and anything else if that one major paradigm that it supports is a right fit for the problem at hand.

What sort of imperative flow do you find awkward in Python?

Some people have good taste for technologies and others do not.

Lots of money? Lots of unpaid volunteers! Compare with Java, Go, JS, Swift, even Rust!

how do you define "field of computing"?

It's taught in most beginning CS courses, has wide adoption for scientific computing and business. It seems like most apps are prototyped in R/Python before functions get ported to c or parallelized with dask/spark/scala

python was never intended to be a functional language, but it has lambdas. ruby and C++ are both "functional, OO, imperative" in the same way.

C with classes and first class functions is probably the best language