Why is Python a good first scripting language?

[Roy Smith]

news at agapow.net (Paul-Michael Agapow) wrote:
> Ruby is cool and solid, but the developer community is still
> small. It's at the point where Python was 3 or 4 years ago.

I find it fascinating that people who know neither Python nor Ruby seem 
th think Ruby is the cooler language.

We've got one hot-shot C++/Java guy here who refuses to even try Python 
because he can't get his head past the indentation issue and because 
Python's flavor of OO doesn't match his conception of what OO should be.  
But, he keeps saying things like, "If I were to learn a scripting 
language, I'd learn Ruby".

At the other end of the spectrum, we had another guy here who only 
qualified to be called a programmer because he rode the dot-com craze 
where anybody who could get a 20-line Perl script to run was called a 
programmer.  He also knew neither Ruby or Python, but insisted that Ruby 
was the way to go, even if his analysis was no deeper technically than 
"Python blows, Ruby rules".

If Perl is to Python as Windows is to Macintosh, then I guess Python is 
to Ruby as Macintosh is to BeOS :-)