&gt; My only question about the 2-tool combination is whether there are better combinations. Python has all the libraries and community support so any alternative would need similar. Maybe Node?<p>Absolutely not. Python has a much more mature set of libraries which are much better designed, better tooling, and a much more reasonable type system, and the community has only recently begun to be polluted by Web 2.0 &quot;move fast and break things&quot; mentality. The Node ecosystem is <i>built</i> on that mentality, and while outlier developers at the front line of the JS community are able to be extraordinarily productive in JS&#x2F;Node, developers building user-facing programs just get bogged down in breaking changes in dependencies, buggy and poorly-designed 0.x libraries, untraceable framework code that prioritizes configuration over convention, and intractable errors caused by a broken type system (this final issue is significantly improved in ES6).<p>Source: Worked in Python 2.x for a few years, worked in Node for a few years, currently work in Python 3.x and Node (general design is to limit Node to compiling and testing the browser-based part of our product). JS&#x2F;Node is maybe 20% of our code, 20% of our features, 50% of our dev time, and 80% of our bugs.