umm.... YES!
Python ROCKS. It's a great around language and is used for everything from system scripts, web based technologies, small applications, major applications, scientific systems, games (big and small) data collecting and all sorts of everything in between. Hell I even use it for scientific calcuator.
The actual language itself is smallish. There isn't a whole lot to learn in that way and there are only a handfull of 'gotchas' you have to look out for, compared to other languages. It has very good memory management and a agressive garbage collector. It's object-oriented capabilities are on par with Java or C++, but it's completely usefull in simple programs with only loops and calculations.
It has a wealth of optimized and very usefull add-on modules. People have made modules for complex math, scientific calculations. They have made window manager bindings, bindings with multimedia systems such as gstreamer, bindings with widget libraries such as QT, GTK, and various other systems to give you 'native' look and feel to your applications, including in Windows. There are numerious bindings aviable for complex 3d game enviroments even... such as Ogre3d.
There is a lot of shared code online and examples litter the average Linux system for everyday used things which you can look at and use code from (most everything would be GPL'd in that case).
Also due to Window's complete lack of ability to handle complex dependancies issues people have made python modifiers to take regular interpreted python code and 'compile' it into standalone exe-style executables so that you can have end users run it without having to deal with downloading the latest widget set or whatever. All the modules and such would be included into the binary. People are developing similar things for other operating systems, too.
More and more frequently game makers are using python in this fasion as 'scripting' language or a glue language to bring together optimized code written for various game subsystems that were originally written in other languages such as C or C++
Python has a reputation for being slow, which it is. But it's a very fast way to write applications. In addition to that there are numerious projects like psyco to bring newer scientific concepts into optimizing complex math functions on the fly and increase the performance of python programs to near-java/C++ levels. Also many people prototype programs in python and once the design is 'correct' then they will profile the programs to find out what is consuming the cpu and memory resources. Then they can take this information and rewrite the code into optimized C/C++ form and import it back into the python program as modules.
However this is easier said then done, there is a lot of 'glue' code that needs to be written to make good python modules. There are people working on 'intermediate' languages specially designed to make it simple to write optimized modules.. they would allow programmers to use any combination of C-like or python-like syntaxs that would then be compiled into modules to be used by the programmer to speed up larger python programs.
Quite a few of these optimized modules exist and the vast majority are freely aviable for you to use in your programs for whatever purpose. For instance you have PyODE, which is a physics simulation library for simulating things like gravity, solid object friction, and rigid body mechanics. There is PyODB, which is a language binding to the unixODBC API for easy, standardized, and fast communications with external database servers. Python people also have a DB-API specificly designed to standardize how python programs interact with databases.
Some examples of python programs...
http://www.zope.org/
Zope is a open source application server for web-based applications. Numerious examples abound of people using it. Most stuff is open source so you can incorporate parts of other programs people developed into your own stuff.
http://panda3d.org/
Panda3d is a open source (not quite GPL compatable due to one small clause, unfortunately) 3d gaming engine designed specificly for use with python by the Walt Disney corporation for use in their MMOG: 'ToonTown'.
Google uses python extensively internally.
Somebody even wrote 'PyGoogle' which is python extensions for using the Google Web API.
http://diveintomark.org/projects/pygoogle/ Incorporate searches, queries, and stuff like spelling suggestions from google into your python programs.
http://www.pitivi.org/
Pitivi is a video NLE (non-linear editor) being developed using Python and the Gstreamer bindings. Gstreamer is a multimedia framework that takes codecs, filters, controls, and other items and allows the programmer to string them together in a sort of pipeline to create rich mulimedia programs. (still maturing framework btw. under rapid developement) It sort of the same concept used for text handling in a unix shell with awk, sed, grep, and other tools.
So I think python is worth it to learn.
check out 'dive into python' book (bookstore or free online) if your already familar with other languages and OO stuff.
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