I've been using Python for over six years now (it's hard to believe it's been that long!), and it's been interesting to watch the language grow since 1.3. A nice thing about Python's growth is that it's been fairly smart - as it picks up new features, it also simplifies itself. A lot of the old confusions / problems are gone or going away, and helpful features have popped up -- the type/class dichotomy is on its way out (it's interesting to see the prototype 'bool' type written up in Python by subclassing from 'int' - see PEP 285); booleans are coming in (I've always liked the way Python has treated true/false values, but it's nice to have actual 'True' and 'False' objects, and the built in 'bool' constructor); much of the old 'string' module has become methods on the 'string' type, removing the oddities of having a bunch of procedures to operate on a very common object in an object-oriented language; there are more unifications in expressions (the 'in' operator can now be used to search for substrings in a string: if 'this' in 'there was this thing..': in place of if 'there was this thing..'.find('this') > -1:; this also applies for dictionary keys: 'somekey' in mydict in place of mydict.has_key('somekey')); iterators are offered throughout the language now, sometimes offering shortcuts for common operations (such as reading individual lines from a file), and keeping resource use down for others; and we finally have nested scopes. Not to mention the little delights like Generators and List Comprehensions.