I haven't used Python for long, still I think it's clean and friendly enough to be a good choise to learn programming. Sure I think it may not be the best option when talking about market share, but if you really like programming, you will learn a new language; it has never been a stoper for somebody that really likes programming. And Python will give you a fine setup for everything else. There's also the advantange of knowing a scripting language to do those little or repetitive tasks that sometimes big languages are not the fastest (on development time, at least) options or the best fit. For example, I like Ruby when it's time to process text files. If we are talking about the languages used in "the real world", why has nobody said a word about Java? From my understanding, Java is the most widely used language (if we take apart C/C++ since it is innecesarilly complex nowadays, at least for line of business applications). I'm mainly a C# developer, so I can't say a lot about Java, but I can't deny its importance in the business. What do you think?