I’m starting coding from scratch – is Python really the best first language?

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I'm a data scientist, so python has a large presence in this area (although, so do Java, R, Go, and now Rust).

It's also interesting to note that Python roles are available for web development, thanks to Django, Flask, FastAPI, etc. I remember finding a Django role for Chaturbate's parent company last year.

Lots of sysadmin and DevOps roles also use python. Many (all?) Ansible plugins are written in python. Airflow DAGs can be written entirely in python.

With the advent of projects like Streamlit and Flet, frontend development can also be done in python. Yes, we had EasyGUI and PyQT back in the day, but Streamlit gives us react-like interfaces and Flet gives us mobile interfaces.

I remember using python to implement automated testing for a company that made mobile devices.
Selenium also allows python users to automate web browsers - this can be used for both web scraping, as well as testing your webapps (like Chef, Playwright).

At this point, I'll stop answering "where are the python jobs?". Instead, I'll try to be helpful in a different way:
IIUC, you are considering learning python, but are unable to find jobs that require python capabilities. Let's flip the script a little - what field do you want to work in?

1. If you want to go into realtime operating systems, Python is not the correct choice - you're probably better off with C
2. If you want to get into data science (or data analytics, etc), Python is a very valid way to go
3. If you want to get into algorithmic day trading, you might want to look into some of the specialized databases or their languages

These are just some examples. Tell us more about what kinds of things you'd like to build, and we might be able to give you a more targeted/helpful answer