What are we missing?

[del]

I'm not a huge fan of Python. It's great for file I/O and putting together a quick GUI with QT Designer. Beyond that it's basically a glorified shell script and it's only as good as the underlying C functions it depends on to do the heavy lifting. It's conceptually a real mess and produces ugly code and bad habits IMHO.

[Thaddy]

Beyond that it's basically a glorified shell script and it's only as good as the underlying C functions it depends on to do the heavy lifting. It's conceptually a real mess and produces ugly code and bad habits IMHO.

I tend to disagree about the "real mess" and "ugly code": it is rather organized, much more so than Pascal, otherwise a program doesn't work.....Proper indentation, proper layout rules...
What I agree with you is that most of the heavy lifting is done by libraries written in native languages (not only written in C, but e.g.... FreePascal....). But that is the case with a lot more of that type of languages.

Also note that I rely on some heavy lifting in FPC too by using bindings for an OS or certain libraries (imagemagick, openssl, etc) All of us do, when you think about it...

[marcov]

One could argue that if you need a separate language for that, you didn't choose your primary language well.

I see no point in maintaining Python skills if you are fluent in say Lazarus or Delphi. (or even VS C++ for that matter). No matter how many tutorials there are on the web.

If you go down that path under the guise of '"easiness", you nearly always get sucked into debugging problems etc and spend more time on it than you saved in the first place, at least that is my experience. The trouble of having to install both python + gui libs to have a simple form entry app on Windows is IMHO already prohibitive.

It can be different if you are in an environment with a lot of non programmers that use the scripting language too, and you communicate using python script, but I see no point in isolation