An Interview with Guido van Rossum

That explains this baffling part of the conversation... Squeak and Disney?

Willison: Yes. Something called MEL . And something called Squeak, which is being created at Disney.

van Rossum: Isn't Squeak a Smalltalk derivative?

Willison: Yes. It's used in movie production and 3D graphics, as is MEL. It seems like there's an explosion of small, single-purpose languages.

Short answer: In most places you would otherwise use Perl, Ruby, C, C++, or Java. It's not as fast as C or OCaml (except in programs which are almost entirely calls to libraries, e.g. string-heavy stuff), but you can rewrite the hotspots in C later (if you ever actually need to), and the overall development time will be much shorter. Even if you never use it for anything else, Python is an excellent prototyping language.

For a more in-depth answer, look at these:

http://python.org/about/

http://diveintopython.org/

Also, see the standard library's module index, which is one of the places the language really shines: http://docs.python.org/modindex.html