[ghshephard]

Suggesting that python will soon enough become the new perl is high praise indeed. Perl runs a good portion of the internet, and is (and will likely for the next half century) be a very, very popular language.

It's definitely the case that python was shoehorned into some places where it probably wasn't the best fit, but, at the time (1999-2001) was really the high-level dynamic language that had a lot of mindshare. A lot (almost all?) of companies that tried to use Zope as their application server back then would probably be looking at Java as their deployment platform today.

Python sits in that nice "batteries included, easy to read, reasonably fast to write" space. I tend to write most of my scripts in Python, because a week later, I could never understand the perl code I wrote, but, for some reason, python code never had that problem for me.

I don't expect too many people are writing quick "one-off" scripts in Go (I'd be interested to be proven wrong though), so perl/python/awk/bash all still have a place in people's toolkit.