Well, the article did not really go into very much detail about what makes Python well suited to a job, other than to detail Pascal's limitations and to suggest that Ruby has similar limitations, but it was a very interesting trip down memory lane.

Personally, I got my programming start in 1973, working in BASIC on a school district minicomputer accessed by a teletype device.

My first in depth programming was in a FORTRAN IV implementation that was essentially from the FORTRAN 66 specification - no "structured programming" constructs we appreciate today. However, in my first year as an undergraduate student, we used a FORTRAN preprocessor, which provided structured If...Then...Else and Do...While constructs. Shortly thereafter, I used PL/1, Algol 60, and Pascal. Believe it or not, I found PL/1 to be the most complete language for actual development use, and indeed, when I graduated, my first every day programming language was PL/1. I also spent about eight months as a COBOL maintenance programmer before finding an advanced development research project to assess the state of personal computers and small department systems - with Windows, UNIX, minicomputers, and PCs. I learned C at that time and used it on both the PC and the UNIX systems. I also learned the Bourne Shell at that time, and from that time forward spent more time programming in shell and interactive languages more than traditional programming languages.

To this day I like programming in Bash the best, but when I want a graphical interface in my tool, I often write in Bash or C and use small TCL/Tk programs to provide the glue to bring it all together. Works well for me, fast and easy.