> can move existing "learned the hard way special cases" byzantine business code to something that can run on a web server and be accessed by the companies employees rather than passing around scripts for them to run
Or… you could just use Django. The framework built for running python on a web server.
That's totally different, at least out of the box. The use-case seems to be running user-generated scripts that aren't known in advance and can be added/edited/ran in a self-service manner.
The usual way to do this is get a Python interpreter, sandbox the hell out of it on your server, and then run the untrusted code but this obviates the need for security paranoia quite a bit since it's running in the user's environment.
Or… you could just use Django. The framework built for running python on a web server.