I am a faculty member of a cs department. We currently teach C++ in our intro to programming course. I am teaching this class and it seems to me that we would be much better served teaching python in the intro course, C++ for Data structures, as we do now, and Java in object oriented programming, as we do now. Some of my colleagues agree with me but some still see python as a niche language and don't understand how we could teach anything beyond C, C++ or Java.
I have looked at several interesting academic papers, on doing just this approach. I have also looked through the python web page to get examples of industry players using python in a non-trivial way. Yes, I know, Google, Microsoft, Sun, CIA website running on Plone, NOAA, NASA. If anyone has any recent articles, or if anyone on the list is at a fortune 500 company, how do I refute the notion that Python is a "marginal" language because according to TOBIE it only less than a 6% market share. -michael -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list