Comment by rgovostes

My university's CS program was taught in Ancient C++. This was fine for the Comp Sci majors, but the intro-level class was required for all science majors. I fielded many pleas for help on homework assignments and saw that many struggled so much with the (let's be honest, incredibly unintuitive) syntax and inscrutable compiler errors, that they couldn't internalize the more fundamental concepts that the course was trying to teach.

Later on, I joined the curriculum committee and argued for it to be taught in Python. The faculty weren't convinced at the time but I see now that eventually they moved the intro course to Python and kept the later courses in C++, which seems like a wise decision. Python is far more approachable and will serve science students well if they ever need to use Pandas etc. (The second-semester C++ course has you implement the STL container types, which is an extremely valuable exercise.)