It's nice to be able to type something short for such common actions as running a development server. I'd rather use Rake, or something similar in Python, though. I tried porting part of it to Rake, and found the syntax to be much clearer afterward to me. My guess is that more Python programmers would be comfortable modifying Ruby than would be comfortable editing Makefiles.
http://gist.github.com/543235
There are also some Rake-like python tools, but I need to investigate more.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1407837/is-there-an-rake-...
