Python advocacy ... HELP!

[Michael_D_G]

I am a faculty member of a cs department. We currently teach C++ in
our intro to programming course. I am teaching this class and it seems
to me that we would be much better served teaching python in the intro
course, C++ for Data structures, as we do now, and Java in object
oriented programming, as we do now.
Some of my colleagues agree with me but some still see python as a
niche language and don't understand
how we could teach anything beyond C, C++ or Java.

I have looked at several interesting academic papers, on doing just
this approach. I have also looked through the
python web page to get examples of industry players using python in a
non-trivial way. Yes, I know, Google,
Microsoft, Sun, CIA website running on Plone, NOAA, NASA. If anyone
has any recent articles,
or if anyone on the list is at a fortune 500 company, how do I refute
the notion that Python
is a "marginal" language because according to TOBIE it only less than
a  6% market share.

-michael