[dkersten]

In my experience a lot of Python programmers move on to learning the functional Python features and libraries and then after they get that down, the eventually jump ship to a mainly-functional language (a lot of people seem to move to Haskell, I personally moved to Clojure).

This is based on my own personal experience, that of Python Ireland members and from things I've read or seen (here on HN and elsewhere).

[jlv]

Do you mind elaborating on what 'functional' libraries exist in python? I've practiced a bit using the whole map-reduce paradigm in different ways in python, but I'm not really sure what you mean beyond that.

[stephen_mcd]

itertools, functools.

I once read a quote that when you're using itertools frequently enough in your Python code you're one step away from jumping to a language like Haskell.

[dkersten]

I've heard that the OReilly Haskell book was one of the most bought books at PyCon.

My progression went similarly - I started using map, reduce, filter and list comprehension a lot, then moved on to itertools and functools and then decided what I really wanted was a functional by default language. That, the great concurrency support and the desire to learn a lisp-based language properly[1] made me choose Clojure.

It seems that this progression is actually fairly common. I still use Python for quick'n'dirty scripts (especially as a shell scripting alternative) and for web development (for other people; I use Clojure for my own code).

[1] I already knew some Scheme, but never used it for any real projects.