[protomikron]

You are right, it is crucial to emphasize to beginners that these languages are different (and C++ not being some kind of add-on to C, which is - considering its name - a valid guess, but we have the same discussion with Java and JavaScript). But I think learning C, Python and JavaScript (and maybe some Java) to a degree that let's you get useful work done, is a lot simpler (meaning takes less time) than learning C++.

Not that I would discourage anyone from learning C++ (ok, probably, I might) I just consider it a bad PL for people starting out with programming.

[jjawssd]

Not only that, but Cython really takes away a huge amount of performance bottleneck encountered in Python code by generating pure C from a Python language superset.

More details here: http://scikit-learn.org/stable/developers/performance.html