[chrisjharris]

I partly agree but this can too easily become an argument in favour of the lowest common denominator. I can hardly imagine a language that's easier to learn than Python, and for that reason a) lots of people already know it, and b) those that don't can learn fast. But that's at least partly because it just doesn't have features that are widely regarded as beneficial - a type system, metaprogramming, good functional constructs etc.

Before anyone comes back at me for suggesting that Python lacks essential features, I know there are third-party libraries or core features to do this stuff, but they're pretty far off-meta, so your team isn't going to know them, or having good idioms/consensus for using them, and so at that point you might as well just learn something a little more advanced anyway (Julia would be an excellent choice).