Python is now the most popular introductory language at top U.S. universities

At the University of Queensland, Python is used for mech engineering courses. One of the other considerations that I think helped give Python the edge was its simplicity, in that it can be 'programming for non-programmers' and helps a lot of newcomers meet the simple scripting requirements they have without needing to understand more complex programming concepts.

Secondly, it makes for an easy transition from Python to Matlab, and Matlab is used a fair bit throughout UQ's Mechanical and Mechatronics departments. They both share very similar syntax (the major issue for most mech engineers, who deal with little more than loops, is that Python is 0-indexed whereas Matlab is 1-indexed).

The above makes Python a great introductory langauge for non-programmer beginners like mech engineers. It is ridiculously simple and human-readable, and when you're outside an IT/EE department then you don't end up spending excess time explaining the quirks of a language to those who will never care for it. On the other hand, it still gives more than enough rope for those that do end up wanting to run with it and they can end up doing some pretty fancy stuff with it.

Does Monash align there in that it's used in the non-IT related technical degrees?

Ruby is perhaps more dominant than Python in web development. Not that Rails is necessarily better than Django, but it seems there are more Rails developers than Django ones. However Ruby seems to be pretty much confined to web development and deployment tools. It also makes great DSLs thanks to its block syntax. However in general Python is more popular than Ruby.

One reason is that Python is used for system programming (e.g: the Linux apt system), desktop applications, big data (thanks to numpy) so you might find it a better investment for general purpose software development.

Another reason, which maybe explains the first one, is that Python looks more similar to C++/Java. Basically it's a simplification of those languages (the {} pair traded for a single colon, no type declarations, etc) plus some handy shortcuts. Ruby is from a somewhat different lineage (Smalltalk) and it shows in many places (e.g. the do |variable| ... end blocks). It can be used to write more natural language looking programs and combining that with some metaprogramming sometimes both amazes and unsettles programmers that come close to the language for the first time.

I suggest that you learn a little of both of them, working on the problem you want to solve, and decide by gut feeling what you would like to work with. I went the Ruby way because I can't stand some of the syntax of Python, not that Ruby is perfect.

You can do this in Python too, if you wanted to:

http://modpython.org/live/mod_python-3.3.1/doc-html/pyapi-ps...

But it's not a very good architecture, in the meanwhile we had better approaches, such as MVC and MVVM.

Anyway, CS is not web programming, but should focus on the fundamentals of computer science, for which there are far better languages than PHP.

My college programming intro class is C++, which IMO is a total nightmare.

It is not that I don't agree with your point, actually I think It makes perfect sense. Eventually, anyone who considers him/herself as a serious CS student has to get his/her hands dirty with those relative low level languages in order to have a through understanding of what computer really is and in reality how it works.

Ironically, it is this very same reason that makes C++ as a entry point into programming a horrible idea. Because in order to understand it, IMO, a solid understanding of computer architecture is a MUST. Things like how memory is allocated, how call stack works, and why IO interfaces looks like it is now are unrealistically hard to take in a single course for those new comers with definitely zero programming knowledge, who probably would scratch their head out all night wondering why the following code snippet doesn't work (which wasn't valid back then in my freshman year, don't know whether it is valid now):

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/737240/c-c-array-size-at-...

And as it is a entry level course, usually a lot of details are skipped which makes it even more confusing. Telling from my personal experience, it is really frustrating that I once want to quit programming for good.

Luckily enough, I got to know Python at that time. In relatively short period of time, I could come up with a simple web crawler to scrap and download movie torrent files from the web. This is important to me that for the first time I realize I could do something both INTERESTING and USEFUL with programming language, which in turn gives me the motivation to go back and look at those lessons I run away from.

I'm also an MIT grad (class of 1992). I took 6.001 back in the Scheme days. I loved it, and have found that the lessons learned in that class have stayed with me for a very long time. I now teach professional programming classes, and it's a rare lecture that doesn't use some of what I talked about there.

The irony is that I teach a lot of Python programming classes. And despite that, and my love of Python, I think it's a shame that they no longer use Lisp (or Scheme, or Clojure) for the equivalent of 6.001.

Python is easier to understand and get into. And Python has some amazing features that you want, such as first-class functions. And it's a real-world language, which you can't say about Clojure, even with its growing popularity. And Python is my strong recommendation for everyone's first language, because it's so easy to get into.

But there are some things that are just easier to understand in Lisp than in other languages. Implementing Lisp in Lisp (metacircular evaluator) is a fabulous way to think about programming languages that is harder in Python than in Lisp. (Not impossible, but harder.) Lisp allowed us to think about programming in all sorts of new ways, because it handled so many of those paradigms so well.

So I still think that the intro CS class should be in a form of Lisp, because it opens your mind up to possibilities. But if you're not going to go that route, then Python is a terrific first language, and I'm quite happy to see it getting the attention it deserves.