Python is an interpreted language like Perl, Java, and JavaScript.

Python is a byte-compiled language, like Java. Byte-compiled code is executed on the PVM (Python Virtual Machine).

Python is dynamically typed (no pre-declaration of a variable or declaration of its type is necessary).

Python is an object-oriented language (that is, its data types are defined with methods for working with values) that integrates other programming paradigms as well. It is sometimes described as an object-oriented scripting language. It is not as purely object-oriented as Ruby or Java, but is more traditionally object-oriented (differentiating objects and classes) than JavaScript (which is prototype-based).

Influences on Python include ABC (which Guido van Rossum had worked with before designing Python), Modula-3, C, C++, Algol-68, SmallTalk, and Unix shell scripting.

Python has borrowed some functional-language constructs from Lisp and Haskell.

Python is used as a shell scripting language, a network scripting language, an application development language, and a numeric and scientific programming language. The reference implementation, CPython, can be described as a control language, since it relies on C code and is easy to extend with more C code. For this reason it can also be described as a prototyping language: one can write a preliminary version of an application in Python, then move selected components to a compiled language rather than rewriting it completely.

References

Chun, Wesley J. Core Python Programming. 2nd ed, Prentice Hall, 2007. Chapter 1: “Welcome to Python!”

Lutz, Mark. Learning Python. 3rd ed, O’Reilly, 2008. Chapter 1: “A Python Q&A Session”