My background is fine art and in the social/political sciences.. what kinds of conversations are being had around Python and the communities who utilize it the most versus the Ruby/Perl crowd. IS there a preference for Python over an equivalent for say the sciences/academia?

While I understand its a tool, sometimes its nice to pick a language based on shared narrative, too.

I have a game design background and I've noticed Python has a game development community, just as an example.

Languages seem to evolve with the interests of the communities who use them, too. So I'm just trying to learn a bit before I dive in too much with my first programming language.