And Berkeley and Stanford. Python is coherent enough to be taught to children yet scalable enough to run Google's infrastructure and flexible enough for AQR and Citadel.
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It all got started, I believe, because the very earliest Googlers (Sergey, Larry, Craig, ...) made a good engineering decision: "Python where we can, C++ where we must" -- they used (a subset of) C++ for the parts of the software stack where very low latency and/or tight control of memory were crucial, and Python, allowing more rapid delivery and maintenance of programs, for other parts.
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If you actually want to get work done, learn Python first. If you want to talk about how awesomely fast your quirky C++ code will be, by all means, learn it. But you're going to be surpassed in performance by people that use FPGAs and microwaves and surpassed in productivity by people that know shell and scripting languages.
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The task:
Read a file of text, determine the n most frequently used words, and print out a sorted list of those words along with their frequencies.
Knuth came up with a typically clever, lengthy, low-level implementation [...]. McIlroy then somewhat perversely wrote a six-line shell script that did the job, basically changing the subject away from literate programming and toward a critique of Knuth’s doing something low-level and complicated when unnecessary.
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The speed game has since moved on to electrical engineering and physics. And all those people may be shut down by congress.
To "not" quote Charles Darwin 
:
"In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment."
