Python also fits its design space amazingly well (that's what's meant by "Guido's time machine"). It's a glue language, with a REPL, but it's not a shell (i.e. it's not meant to glue programs primarily through stdin/stdout/argv, but instead libraries through their APIs). It was a very useful (Greenspun's tenth rule) and somewhat underserved niche (perl, scheme and tcl come to mind).
I know this is a really late reply, but your comment says ‘[i]t was a …’. Was that just an odd choice of tense or are you arguing that Python is no longer useful for its niche? If so, and I’m genuinely asking, is there a replacement for the glue language aspect that retains Pythons wide standard library approach?
