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There are plenty of serious discussions about Python vs. Lua for game development. These two languages are easily the most popular choices (besides home-brew languages, which is pretty much an inferior choice to using something already developed like Lua or Python).

The really short version of the debate I've heard is:

1. Lua is easier to setup and integrate intially.
2. Python is a much more full fledged language, and generally better the larger the project is.

Also, in reply to your particular comments, modern Python is very good with memory management (it has added mark-and-sweep in addition to reference counting), and Python is fairly reasonable for "directly storing data". More specific to Civ4, however: Turn based games are not going to be as concerned about speed (where Lua often does win). (For instance, World of Warcraft uses Lua for the interface, and it really does need to be as fast as possible.)

Further Reading (says it better than I can).

http://lua-users.org/wiki/LuaVersusPython
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/15/ 2154222&tid=206&tid=156
http://mozart.chat.net/~jeske/Projects/ScriptPerf/
http://www.gdconf.com/archives/2004/ (search for 'Lua')
http://www.pygame.org/

App:
http://mozart.chat.net/~jeske/Projects/OpenBundle/ ref_otherimpl.hdf

Compare that with various .jar file types:

MyApp.jar/
MyApp.class
Resources/
META-INF/manifest.MF

and

Sage.jar/
Content/Res/
locale/

considering that ATi is better at DirectX and nVidia

You have that backwords, right? Or does ATI just suck at both? I suppose it *was* a year or so ago, so the 'right now' modifier might come into play....

I certainly have never heard of anyone that had to return a laptop because NVidia couldn't write to specs: link.

After dealing with the issue for a month (favorite advice from laptop vendor: 'just disable hardware acceleration') I will most certainly never buy a laptop from said dealer, nor I will ever own another ATI card.

Dealer wasn't IBM (as per the link); it was Dell. What the hell is it about the crooked 'E' that makes a company turn to the dark side?

Linux isn't really a desktop, it's more of an embedded system development kit. If you consider it this way, you're expectations will be set better.

I have a mythtv 2-tuner setup, and you can read about my mythtv setup experience. Most of the problem setting this up had to do with odd driver-kernel version problems which don't exist in the same ways on Windows.

Obviously having vendor supplied drivers would be great, but that's not going to happen until Linux kernel drivers are not a moving target. However, Linux kernel developers seem to intentionally avoid making binary driver standards as some kind of 'pro open source' politics. It's a shame.

don't mix the GUI apps into the same dir with the command line ones.

It's my opinion that you should be able to install an application virtually anywhere, and there should be a standard way to update the PATH enviroment variable

Just do it with app dirs (aka bundles), like ROX and NeXT and GNUstep and OS X. Then users can install GUI applications by drag and drop and move them around however they wish. (And, I should probably add, this in no way precludes the apps from sharing libs or frameworks; only those need be in hard-coded locations, which users need not worry about.)

I love it when the Sun Java VM crashes my laptop because of the crappy drivers for the ATI Rage Mobility chip in it.

http://www.chat.net/~jeske/Projects/ScriptPerf/