One could argue that Fuze - a commercial programming language - is a bunch of extra gunk versus the free, open source and widely available alternative of almost

One could argue that Fuze - a commercial programming language - is a bunch of extra gunk versus the free, open source and widely available alternative of almost any other language. But you're right, a fairer comparison would be against a Python learning environment that sweeps some of the cruft and gotchas under the rug, and complexity is very tough for beginners. Speaking from experience running and helping in workshops, I found a lot of Python learners would name their code "somemodule.py" after the module they're learning about, and this would subsequently break "import somemodule". So there's a lot of merit in "safer" environments.