Kinda side-topic, but: why do most "hacker advice" tend to recommend Python over Ruby or Perl (ok, Perl is "just old") as a beginner's scripting language? I love Python and I like using it in production better than Ruby, but Ruby is much more of a "hacker's language" and pushes you to more "lispyness" in spirit and practice! (I admit I'am a bit of a Python ecosystem fanboy, with all the cool and easy to use machine learning tools and libs, but this state of affairs is a bit unintuitive - and I'm looking at this types of questions from a language designer's perspective too as I'm working on a language that has 99.9% chances of not tacking over the world, but that 0.1% is enough to "make me high" and keeps me banging my hammers on until I get to something that I can show to the world).