At the moment though, I use Python for time management (using some scripts I wrote), a general purpose calculator, data munging on the fly, watching memcache stats, reporting and some other general bits of duct tape and string.
At the moment though, I use Python for time management (using some scripts I wrote), a general purpose calculator, data munging on the fly, watching memcache stats, reporting and some other general bits of duct tape and string.
Having the power of .Net in a scripting language is great, but it would have been even nicer if that language was consistent with the others on the platform (C#, JS, Ruby, Python for instance.) In fact I regularly think of converting our existing PS deployment scripts to Python, and better tooling support would definitely help.
Don't try and think of it as similar to other shells like bash, but as an interactive console for objects. The operators, flow mechanisms and semantics make a lot of sense from that perspective, at least to me.
I've found that in that capacity, and as soon as I grokked the object pipeline, it's a wonderful tool with access to the entire .net ecosystem and a really hard push from Microsoft to have support for it on most of their tools
I've been automating several procedures with it and it's been working great.
That said, I also have some (iron)python scripts for some other tasks that don't involve as much glue between applications and services.