I find myself bashing my head against the Windows platform way too many a time. (A hangover from my current day job)
Are there any significant drawbacks to using Python? (Other than the usual cries about the GIL and it being interpreted voiced by certain groups in the programming world.)
Drawbacks, the tooling is superb, but it will take you months to wrap your brains around the tooling, idioms and best practices. Expect a learning curve to get acclimated with things.
Another plus is the community is self-aware and wants to get work done.
There are other programming languages where if you criticize them - instead of taking it as an engineer - they get their feelings hurt and delve into deeper denial.
In 2015, there are numerous tools to handle cases where GIL, as an example. https://wiki.python.org/moin/Concurrency/
Coming from a pure Microsoft background, and that not being C# but databases and cubes, I find some of the freedom in the ways of working with Python "scary" at times. Microsoft tends to build a nice set of tracks that their developers seem to follow so it all ends up very corporate and "best practice". (Just my personal opinion) It thus feels like there are much more "training wheels" applied for beginners in something like C# and .Net than what you have in most open source technologies.
Thanks again for your replies.