I can't help thinking that almost everything he lists applies more to Scheme than Python. Scheme also has the advantage of being much simpler, smaller, more con

I can't help thinking that almost everything he lists applies more to Scheme than Python. Scheme also has the advantage of being much simpler, smaller, more concise, more flexible and more elegant than Python. It actually does functional programming well rather than half-heartedly, and is rather nice for OOP as well. Additionally, Scheme has one very important property that Python lacks--there is almost no magic. Even definitions and assignments (define and set! respectively) look like normal function calls. It also makes it clear that very little is fundamental to a language--with Java and Python things like classes and control structures are special and built into the language; with Scheme they do not differ superficially from normal functions. With Java I thought classes and objects were somehow the only way to do it; Scheme clearly showed me that they do not even have to be part of the core language. Now, Scheme does have some complicated ideas like macros and continuations, but there is no reason to teach those to beginners--it's an eminently useful language as is, and extremely simple. The very first CS course I took in college used Scheme; we spent something like just two lectures on the language itself. Now that the professor retired they've changed the course over to Python; I think they're still learning the language half-way through the semester. Scheme is also great because, being very simple, it is much easier to implement than Python. And once you have a basic Scheme implementation, you can modify it to see other potential languages. For example, in our intro CS course, we talked about writing a memoizing interpreter and even a lazy interpreter. It's hard to imagine a lazy Python! We even reused Scheme syntax (but not really semantics) to cover logic programming à la Prolog. That course was one of the most enlightening semesters I have ever spent. I really think that Scheme is the perfect introductory didactic language.