I support the wrenches suck! comment. However, Python shines imho in the speed and ease in wich you can reach a working solution. For example, you can tell your roommate to solve in C# this simple task, taken from here:

Given a big server log file, with a lot of lines in this general structure:

81.107.39.38 --... "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 133

Get the total of bytes of data transferred. Consider the last number gives the relevant info, and that this last item can be null (instead of a number, a character '-')

Okay, there are many ways to do this in python, but the paper cited above uses generators. Their advantage is that with generators you dont use any large temporary list, you can run this on a >Gb file and not worry about storage issues. And look at the total code:

wwwlog= open("access-log")
bytecolumn = (line.rsplit(None,1)[1] for line in wwwlog)
bytes= (int(x) for x in bytecolumn if x != '-')
print "Total", sum(bytes)

Also, python shines at readability. This code speaks for itself.