[owlish]

A lot of the discussion in here revolves around "not being able to get an interactive GUI up and running quickly". If this is indeed the main problem with teaching programming with Python, there are many ways of tackling this problem without resorting to teaching Javascript. Don't get me wrong, Javascript is an interesting language, but it has many oddities that could throw off a newcomer.

Sites like OpenProcessing[1] and ideone[2] already allow users to compile and share code in the browser. Why not create a Python GUI "toolkit" that interacts with the browser and can be accessed from an interpreter implemented in Javascript? Granted, this isn't the "vanilla" Python experience, but if you're just ramping up, having shiny bells and whistles to show off to friends is definitely a plus.

[1]: http://www.openprocessing.org/

[2]: https://ideone.com/

[vanderZwan]

An even simpler solution would be Python mode for Processing, which has most (if not all) of the benefits of Python and Processing in one:

http://py.processing.org/

[woah]

Simplest solution of all would be to just use js. I don't think that any syntactical or semantic niceties in Python matter much to an absolute beginner, and the extra layers of indirection you guys propose will just lead to more moving parts and frustration.