I'm currently a week into learning python (about 2/3s the way through o'reilly's lp). I'm learning it because 1) I like learning languages, and 2) I've actually seen job listings that list python.

Some things are quite sad; the worst I've noticed so far is the crippled lambda and lack of real/reasonable scoping (and the hacks to get around it) when doing nested function definitions. (HOLY GOD!) There's also the fact that everything is so OPEN; if you can find something's name (and doing so is EASY) then you can clobber it. The main selling point I've seen with python (and hyped up in the book) is that it plays nicely with C -- you do a prototype in python, find what is slow, and rewrite those parts in C/C++. I've been impressed, so far, by how function call arguments can be specified, and the tricks that result from classes being objects.

Ruby is probably next.