[krupan]

Sigh. You clearly don't remember the year 2003, when your choices were basically C, Perl, bash, php, or Python. C is not a language for quick scripts or dealing with strings like web apps do. Perl was so fun to write, but impossible to read. Bash actually requires you to know bash, awk, sed, grep, and to if you think Python is slow you've never written and used a 2000 line bash program. php was pretty readable and writable, but so full of security pitfalls for Web apps, and was also slow. Python was an amazing breath of fresh air compared to them all!