Just to toss out another example of a project wherein Python is proving very useful as a "glue language", I offer my: http://www.inetarena.com/~pdx4d/ocn/sphpacking.html What's going on here is we have this Java applet that packs spheres in a particular way. We want to use its data to feed another free software package called Qhull, and we want to view the results using free rendering software (Povray) and VRML. So Python comes in and does all the mediation between the apps, reading sphere data, doing computations, passing data out to Qhull, reading it back in, and so on. It's the kind of thing that you want to do fairly quickly, and without trying to memorialize the whole process in some perfect code. A little worse (than perfect) is better in this case. Also, thanks to object-orientation, it's natural to define "Ball" objects which correspond to the balls in the packing. These get properties and methods related to finding all nearby neighbors, and for rendering the results. Python fits the problem, because it fits your brain (or mine at least). Kirby