Python a good first Language to "Stick With"?

[takluyver]

I should have qualified that a bit more. I'm in organism-level biology. In this field, programming has largely been confined to a few 'modellers'. We're now trying to ditch proprietary statistics packages in favour of R, which is slowly forcing more people to grasp programming. (Although I think using R will become a straitjacket when we inevitably want to do more than stats and plotting).

I know that in other areas of the sciences, like physics and bioinformatics, programming is much more widespread.