What are the drawbacks?
Probably, the only drawback that one could find in Python, which is not due to personal preferences, is its execution speed. Typically, Python is slower than its compiled siblings. The standard implementation of Python produces, when you run an application, a compiled version of the source code called byte code (with the extension .pyc), which is then run by the Python interpreter. The advantage of this approach is portability, which we pay for with increased runtimes due to the fact that Python is not compiled down to the machine level, as other languages are.
Despite this, Python speed is rarely a problem today, hence its wide use regardless of this aspect. What happens is that, in real life, hardware cost is no longer a problem, and usually it's easy enough to gain speed by parallelizing tasks. Moreover, many programs spend a great proportion of the time waiting for I/O operations to complete; therefore, the raw execution speed is often a secondary...
