[noir_lord]

I went the other way as well and used Python with Envoy to call every thing from the command line.

It's quick, easy to debug (arguments to commands can be dumped in debug mode, run manually etc).

Also for certain tasks Python annihilates Gulp plugins.

This is a production example (not pretty code per se) http://kopy.io/yvEGl when combined with intellij watchers this makes it very easy to rebuild on change.

[Already__Taken]

It adds yet another dependency just to get a project to initialize though which is a small negative. I guess npm needs python anyway for node-gyp but then you have to stick to python 2.

[noir_lord]

I deploy dev environments via vagrant/ansible so that's a slight upfront cost but something I never have to touch.

Using virtualenvs I can also keep one project isolated from another in terms of jumping around the filesystem.

The convenience is a major win and since I use python for everything other than the web framework which is PHP it actually ties together nicely.

Unconventional but it works really well.