Appeal to popularity, at least I don't have that logical fail.

The original point was that people choose Python because that's all they know, not because they have evaluated the various languages and chosen the best. That's why appeal to popularity is not great, it was an explanation of the popularity.

It is, in the same way SPAM is a problem with consumers: a lot of people like enshittified products and buy SPAM Viagra.

That's why education is important in democracy: otherwise our government gets enshittified.

In OOP most objects should inherit from the default object. You shouldn't be building a hierarchy unless you have a good reason. OOP is about objects, not hierarchies (that's what C++ got wrong).

If they only know one language, they are not experts at choosing languages.

Your code can look like executable pseudocode in any language; if it doesn't, that's on you.

I'll bet your Perl scripts still work after four or five years, don't have to worry about updates breaking things (Although updates breaking things is a solid source of job security, so maybe it can be considered a good thing).

You think Swift is a good language? The only reason people use Swift is because they want to program for Apple products. It's a crap language that has all the warts of C, Objective C, and adds a lot of its own.

If the best thing you can say about a language is "it has good libraries," then it's a bad language.

If your point is that Python has good libraries, then I agree with you.

No skilled person would choose Python as the right tool for the job. The language is trash.

Yeah, in the modern era we choose languages because of the available libraries, not because of the quality of the language itself.

Yes, they used the language they learned first. They didn't choose the language because it's good, if they had they would have used a different language.

What you are saying is that Python has libraries. Which means that you didn't choose it because you like the language, you chose it because other people chose to write stuff in it. So you're just a copycat (which is how we programmers are).

That's not a helpful argument though, because kids also don't need to know how to program.

You really need to look at what you are trying to teach, and how well the kids are learning it. If a significant number of students are having trouble, then you need to change things. I've seen kids who are not traditionally "smart" (and also very young kids) do amazing things with LOGO. In the modern era, Scratch.mit.edu seems to work really well for kids, and most all of them are able to figure it out. So if you want a "no child left behind" something like Scratch is the approach to teach the mindset, then follow up with Python specific syntax once they have the mindset.

Finally, if you aren't teaching how computers work, what are you teaching exactly? Makes it sound like you are just a babysitter using Python as a toy to distract the poor kids, or teaching them to live in a "Searle Chinese room" which is torture.

C would be hugely benefited by adding a set of list functions and a hash table to the standard library.

The advantage of Java (and c#) is that it can be used by large teams without messing things up too badly. A large project written in Javascript ends up with almost intractable type errors (which is why Typescript has become more popular), and a large program written in Python has almost intractable type errors and maddening versioning issues.

With a large team, C++ will inevitably have someone incompetent adding a bunch of memory errors (or adding friend classes or something; overwriting an operator with weird side effects that no one expected). With Java, that doesn't happen.