On the other hand, python, at it's very basic level, gets the syntactic mess that you or I are very familiar with, and removes all of it for first-timer's. Ther

On the other hand, python, at it's very basic level, gets the syntactic mess that you or I are very familiar with, and removes all of it for first-timer's. There are no classes, no functions, just statements. Also, for the "enter a name" and "guess a number" programs, for the beginner, everything I can think of will look effectively the same between the two languages. Furthermore, you can see the results right then and there when you're programming, rather than compiling, running, and repeatedly earning segfaults. That said, the moment they begin to understand the flow of logic, they should move away from that language, so they can comprehend pointers/etc. This is, of course, all my opinion. Dijkstra would disagree with me, and so would many hackers, I'm sure, but wouldn't it be advisable for them to first begin to think in the minuscule steps, like a programmer does, before they have to deal with some of the stresses of C, and, even more so, classes?