What's Python?

This past week I attended the National Technical & Career Conference held in Orlando, FL. It was the first big conference I've ever been to, so I was pretty amazed at all the cool things being offered. I attended workshops on creating an N-tier web application, being an entrepreneur, and even a workshop on the new mobile phones being offered by Microsoft. All pretty cool stuff. But the best part of the whole conference was attending the career fair. When I saw the list of attendees, it was like seeing the Pro Bowl roster of the computer companies: Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Amazon, Intel, Apple.

But something struck me as odd. On my resume, I have Python as one of the languages I am proficient in, since it is what I programmed in for my previous internship. But a few times, I was asked "What is Python?". I knew I couldn't put Ruby, or Ruby on Rails on my resume, since those were fairly new technologies, but Python? Google has been doing extensive work with Python, Apple has had a close relationship with Python, yet I guess it still hasn't hit mainstream. This made me realize the I'm always worried that I'm not able to find all the new technologies that are popping up, but apparently, I'm already pretty in front of the curve.

But aside from that, I think I did well at the fair. I received some interest from a few companies, and we'll see how it all turns out. And if it all doesn't work out, I can always fall on my backup plan: this website I'm trying to start up.