Moving from Perl/PHP to Python/Pylons

I’ve come to the conclusion that a big-boy sysadmin and programmer needs a big-boy language and web framework. I was thinking of a few languages, but they need to fulfill some requirements:

• Versatile. I want to be able to do system programming and web programming to get the biggest bang for the buck.
• Able to leverage a nice web framework for web development.
• Easy to read (Sorry Perl.. you’ll always have a place in my heart)
• Large repository of libraries (think: CPAN)

Which brought me to a few possibilities: Ruby and Python (and perhaps, GNU Common Lisp, ostensibly).

Python won out. As much as my friend Bryce can weave a web of awesome with Ruby using Rails and sometimes writing exploit code, the discovery that turned the tide is that Red Hat writes a lot of system code (including Anaconda) in Python.

Oh, and the forced indentation is not a big deal. I shouldn’t be trying to write Python one-liners anyway.