>>Agreed, as an OO scripting language it's lovely, especially compared to Perl where the OO features never meshed quite right.

Back then the whole OO crowd was with Java though.

Python's Moat was beginner friendliness to write simple scripts, which at the time- Perl was more like a thermonuclear scripting language. Most people who never wanted to graduate to that advanced stage of writing mega million lines of Perl code over a week(which was literally the use of Perl then), realised they needed some thing simpler, easier to learn, and maintain for smaller scripts- Kind of moved to Python.

But then of course simplicity only takes you that far, and its logically impossible to have a simple clean interface to problems that require several variables tweaked. Python had to evolve and is now having the same bloat and complications that plague any other language.

Having said that, I would still use Java if I had to start a backend project.