[jeffe]

To be fair, python has many robust features beyond gc. For example, dicts, which are bread and butter for python abstract away 1000s of lines of C, which leads to very confused students when they first see errors like 'unhashable type: list'. Encountering leaky abstractions always made me uncomfortable when I took my first classes, but for a very first class its still probably better than dealing with memory allocation in C depending on what one expects from an intro class.

[chii]

But when you start using dicts at the beginning, you would be learning about hash maps and what hashing is, etc. This is basically computer science 101 stuff, with which python makes an environment much easier to learn with.