I think you're overestimating the importance of popularity because AutoIt is so specialized and moreover proprietary.
All of the languages I've listed have very good open source implementations and active communities. (Except assembly. But assembly is special, so let's ignore it.) Additionally, all the languages work and are stable.
Really, AutoIt is almost a straw man: it does not compare to any of the languages I listed at all. Reading about it, it seems that almost any modern programming language is going to have much better features, support, implementations, performance...etc.
If AutoIt is the standard you're holding Python too, of course Python is going to seem wonderful! But that's not very telling: any modern language is going to seem magical in that comparison.
If you've only ever used AutoIt and Python, you should really consider learning some other languages. It will give you a much better perspective, and make you think in new ways. I particularly suggest learning a statically typed functional programming language like Haskell.
I know a good bit of other languages, lots of C family and Java, and dabbled with Ruby, Perl, and a few others. I got turned off of the functional languages mainly by Lisp though, as I found it to be unreadable. Perhaps I will try Haskell some day, but so far I am not impressed with purely functional languages for most tasks I do, mainly image and file processing.
Comments
I think you're overestimating the importance of popularity because AutoIt is so specialized and moreover proprietary.
All of the languages I've listed have very good open source implementations and active communities. (Except assembly. But assembly is special, so let's ignore it.) Additionally, all the languages work and are stable.
Really, AutoIt is almost a straw man: it does not compare to any of the languages I listed at all. Reading about it, it seems that almost any modern programming language is going to have much better features, support, implementations, performance...etc.
If AutoIt is the standard you're holding Python too, of course Python is going to seem wonderful! But that's not very telling: any modern language is going to seem magical in that comparison.
If you've only ever used AutoIt and Python, you should really consider learning some other languages. It will give you a much better perspective, and make you think in new ways. I particularly suggest learning a statically typed functional programming language like Haskell.
I know a good bit of other languages, lots of C family and Java, and dabbled with Ruby, Perl, and a few others. I got turned off of the functional languages mainly by Lisp though, as I found it to be unreadable. Perhaps I will try Haskell some day, but so far I am not impressed with purely functional languages for most tasks I do, mainly image and file processing.