The above is just a long euphemism for "interpreter is already shovelwared in". I don't see how "made by Microsoft" is an advantage.
“You can easily write your own report processor in place of the usual megalithic masonry.”
Other people can use it without a special set-up, and you can run in on virtually any host system at school or work without needing admin privileges or web access. They seem like good reasons to at least know how to do it. I mean, you wouldn't knock "learn Bash scripting" the way you're knocking learning how to write native VB scripts for Windows, and "learn Bash scripting" is relevant to literally 2% of the PCs in existence, vs "learn VB scripting" which will work out of the box on 90% of the world's PCs.
It's
objectively a useful skill to know how to use the native scripting language used by 90% of the world's PCs. Being against anyone learning it for the
sole reason that it's "made by microsoft", and promoting as an alternative something which probably has at most a 5% install base in the entire world (assuming 100% of the linux PCs have Python installed, and the same number of Windows boxes), is in fact a fairly irrational position, no matter how much more elegant Python is. That's like telling someone to learn Esperanto instead of English, or to type on Dvorak rather than Qwerty. They're objectively more elegant solutions to the same problem, but all three examples suffer from the same flaw of not taking reality, standards and interoperability into account.