The dirty secret of programming education is that Python is, in practice, a sort of dead end for the majority of the people that it gets pushed on. There's a v

The dirty secret of programming education is that Python is, in practice, a sort of dead end for the majority of the people that it gets pushed on. There's a veneer of simplicity and approachability due to the design of the language itself, but (by-and-large) people often don't progress with it in a meaningful way and don't pick up good practices. (NB to pre-empt the backlash: "often don't" doesn't mean "no one does".) In that regard, it's not terribly dissimilar from Scratch or, say, the path of VBA programmers. Given that it involves the possibility of an annoying installation and setup on platforms where it isn't available by default, and the tooling past that point is itself a bit of a backwater, it's surprising that we're still sticking this out over the decades and still pointing newcomers to Python. We probably should have done something about it by now—where that involves fixing the Python ecosystem, or putting efforts elsewhere. I'm not alone on this. Konrad Hinsen has written extensively from a first person perspective on this as someone who 1. seems to like Python, but 2. has to deal with its (mis)use in the sciences.