I'm a high school computer teacher, and I'm starting a series of programming courses next year (disguised as "game development" classes to capture more interest). The first year will be a gentle introduction to programming, leading to two more years of advanced topics.
I was initially thinking about doing the first year in Flash/ ActionScript, and the later years in Java. My reasoning is that Flash has the advantage of giving a quick payoff to keep the students interested while I sneak in some OOP concepts through ActionScript. Once they've gotten a decent grounding there, they move on to Java for some more heavy-duty programming. I've never used Python, but I keep hearing enough good stuff about it to make me curious. So -- would Python be a good fit for these classes? Could it equal Java as the later heavy-duty language? Does it have enough quickly- accessible sparklies to unseat Flash? I want to believe. Evangelize away. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list