I agree that Python is a general-purpose language that could replace much of the Java code you see around, but I never got the feeling that it is particularly well-suited for the web. For one thing, with significant whitespace, it's harder to embed snippets of code in HTML or vice versa, so you have to work with a templating library right from the beginning. Some will see this as a blessing in disguise, but for very small projects or mostly self-contained components, having logic and presentation in one file is much more productive.
Ironically bulk of all the Python out there is web code.
In fact Django, Twisted and Zope is all the Python code there is.
Scripting was never Python's forte. Scripting is all about succinctness, power and providing as much power with fewer constructs and restrictions. Which happens to be exactly the very opposite of Python goals, and some thing which more or less as a mission statement Python tries to achieve. This is why Python will likely never be a very successful scripting language.
Python was always a web language for frustrated java programmers who couldn't put with java's problems anymore. Much of Python's success is in web frame work area. Which was previously Java's territory.
Yes, Python is obviously used for web development. But it's very short-sighted, and even absurd, to claim that the "bulk of all the Python out there is web code".
It's even more absurd to claim that "Django, Twisted and Zope is all the Python code there is." That's utter nonsense, in fact.
There are numerous non-web applications that use Python extensively, whether they're partially or fully implemented in Python, or whether they can be scripted using Python.
Then there are the numerous libraries and frameworks for Python, from GUI toolkits through to scientific computation packages.
Many, many organizations use Python internally for a very wide variety of tasks and systems, without broadcasting such use loudly, if at all. This ranges from one-off scripts up to entire multi-million-line software systems.
I sure hope that you're joking, but it just isn't coming across as a joke. Nobody can seriously claim that "Python will likely never be a very successful scripting language" when it has undoubtedly been one of the most successful, and versatile, programming and scripting languages around for many years now.
The biggest reason why Python 3 is/was seeing such late adoption is purely because web frameworks/libraries were not migrated to Python 3. Goes on to tell how many people use Python for what purposes, that absence of a domain of frameworks/libraries slows down the adoption of the language itself for years.
Of course Python is used for scripting purposes. But that amount of code is no where close the web code that is written in Python. It all depends how much code in ratio is written for what purposes and not the total amount of code written for that purposes.
Python's glory days came with web frameworks and continue to be the reason for its fame and wide spread adoption.
I will take Python seriously if it offers the same capabilities as Perl at least on the command line.
Python is a awesome general purpose language. But so far as scripting is concerned it is still no match to Perl
Like I tried to explain to you earlier, those who use Django and the other Python web frameworks that may not really support Python 3 yet are a very small portion of the entire Python user community.
Many of the rest of us have been happily and very successfully using Python 3 for years now, including for the scripting tasks that you incorrectly claim we don't use Python for.
Your other claims like "Python's glory days came with web frameworks and continue to be the reason for its fame and wide spread adoption." are truly absurd and outright wrong. Python was very popular and widely used well before the mid-2000s, when many of the web frameworks you're referring to were first released.
I think you vastly overestimate the amount of Python used for web applications, as well. This is understandable, as such uses are often more visible than the other behind-the-scenes uses. But there's a staggering amount of Python code that you don't see, and that isn't used for web applications.
> The biggest reason why Python 3 is/was seeing such late adoption is purely because web frameworks/libraries were not migrated to Python 3.
That is a pretty big assumption to make, in my opinion.
When we're talking in the context of scripting then we should be talking about what distros have easily accessible python3 packages/libraries, good python3 community support, and whether libraries relevant to sysadmin scripting tasks have been ported to python3 or not.
