Myth: Python is ideal for beginners

[pedro alvarez]

'Python is ideal for beginers'
How many times have i seen that statement?
Is python ideal for beginners?
Upon close investigation and thinking, this is what i found out:

The majority of the python communities resources are geared towards
attracting and absorbing refugees from other languages, not attracting
fresh young converts.( i myself run away from c/c++)

Going around the web, u see tutorials on advanced concepts like gui's,
oop,
web programming etc. U dont see many that teach basic concepts,
because usually it is assumed the reader cut his teath using c++, java
etc.

Also, given pythons own flexibility and open endedness, a fresh
programmer might need some guidance, cos it might be easy to get
confused.
Granted, maybe in a university enviroment, with a lecturer giving
guidance,
it may be ideal.
But is that how we all learned programming? No, most programmers as
young children had access to pc's. Being curious, they wanted to
tinker more.
In my dos days, we used qbasic.
And python is being recommended to those tinkerers.

I think freshers should rather be asked to start with c or vb, cos
theres loads
of information for beginners.
Also, without having to deal with braces and memory leaks in c, or
vb's verbosity how is he going to appreciate python?

So, the conclusion is the python community at the moment is an ideal
refugee shelter,and not a place for fresh recruits.
To further demonstrate, can u show me a prominent author who began his
programming with python?(chuckle,chuckle)
The only authors u see are example:
'George Python(or Osama Bin Python or Raj Python) was programming in
fortran for
85 years before discovering python.'