What are the advantages of Python, PowerShell, and other scripting environments?  We would like to standardize our scripting and are currently using bat and cmd files as the standard.  I think Python would be a better option than these, but am also researching PowerShell and other scripting tools.
The scripts would be used to trigger processes such as wget etc to call web services, or other applications/tools that need to run in a specific order with specific parameters.
We primarily work with the Windows stack, but there is a good chance we will need to support Unix in the future.
One advantage to Python is the availability of third-party libraries and an extensive built-in standard library. You can do a lot of powerful operations quickly and easily with Python on a variety of operating systems and environments. That's one reason we use Python here at the office not only as a scripting language but for all of our database backend applications as well.
We also use it for XML and HTML scraping, using ElementTree and BeautifulSoup, which are very powerful and flexible Python-specific libraries for this sort of work.
Python, PowerShell, or Other?