Pintreo Mardi just asked, on the Python mailing list, a very simple question:

Is the Python language an all in one computer language which could replace C, C++, Java etc?

I kind of liked my answer, so I'm reproducing it here:

That's a really hard question to answer, or at least to answer well.

At a theoretical level, when you ask, "Is Python equivalent to C, C++ and Java", the answer is "yes". In computer science, programming languages are classified by whether they are "Turing Complete" or not (google that for more info). In theory, any Turing Complete ...

At Songza, we're very much into testing.  Our test suite currently has over 600 individual test cases, with new tests getting written almost every day.

A test is useless if it doesn't get run, and people being human, if it's a pain to run a test, they won't run it. That means tests have to be fast.  Over time, we've been working on speeding up our tests, mostly by ferreting out some truly horrendous inefficiencies in how fixtures are constructed. We've gone from having maybe 100 tests that took 5-10 minutes to run, to ...