Eww Python, really? I'm only half joking, Python strikes me as a language that forgot to die. The fragmentation then stagnation effectively killed it. Plus it's performance ain't great, at least with vanilla Python.
Funny, a recruiter cold-called me less than 2 hours ago to see if i wanted a python job, seems to be quite alot of python jobs around and not much competition for them.
I should imagine half of that statement is correct...
Listen Im normally the cheerleader for "pick any language it really doesn't matter", but frankly Python and PHP are the two exceptions. 6-8 years ago when Python was coming on strong, sure. But these days? Not so much. The language fracture and stagnation has really hurt it hard.
I don't really get why we would ever recommend Python.
It isn't fast, it's slow to the level that it will even impact beginners, who shouldn't even be concerned with performance. ( beginner will run into perf issues with PyGame almost immediately )
It isn't particularly popular anymore, outside of a few niche realms
It certainly isn't the easiest language to learn
It's user landscape is horribly fragmented
It's development has happened at a snails pace
It's not particularly easy to embed, nor performant when embedded
The user community isn't huge and I imagine is shrinking
Tools are fairly meh and the good ones are commercial
I mean, if you are going to use a scripting language with the learning curve of a complete language, why not just use the complete language? Or, for scripting... Use a more productive language like Lua or even ECMAScript, with all its warts.
People say it's used in games and that's a statement that you need to mark with an asterisks. Eve Online used Stackless Python server side. Disney used it as the scripting language for Panda for some MMOs and Civ4 used it as a scripting language. Those are all 5+ years old, and frankly none were actually directly Python powered.
It's a language whose star has waned, so I have trouble recommending it to people anymore, with one exception. Yeah, you can still find the occasional Python job, but then you can easily find COBOL or FORTRAN gigs too.
The one exception is if you want to be a Techincal Director in the CG world. In this realm, Python is hugely popular.