Retiring Python as a Teaching Language

I agree. But there is a huge class of people that this argument tends to miss - all the people who learn programming as a tool and not a way of life, like scientists or engineers from other departments. For those, it's ideal to learn one language, and it's OK if they don't completely understand CS. For them it's better to know a language that has wide range of practical applications.

So unless you are absolutely sure that you're going to learn CS, I would still suggest Python as a first (and possibly only) language.

I would also say that doing GUI in like PyQt is really easy, but the documentation and tutorials are lacking.

http://py.processing.org/

In my .emacs are calls to such Unix "command line" programs as Rscript, OS X's open, sudo, rm, gzip, chown, chmod, /opt/mozilla/bin/firefox, OS X's screencapture, fetchmail, OS X's system_profiler, shutdown, ping, ps and growlnotify.

A popular and very much traditional way to call such programs (even in languages like Ruby) is via a traditional Unix shell (invoked usually in languages like C, Perl and Ruby by the "system" function), but there is no need to do that. In emacs for example, one can bypass the Unix shells by writing something like (call-process "sudo" "mv" "-i" "/foo" "/bar"). call-process in turn does a fork and exec and the exec gets the command name (in this case "sudo") and the command's arguments (here, "mv" "-i" "/foo" "/bar").

Actually, "sudo" might have been a bad example because for all it know is implemented by calling out to a traditional Unix shell (though one can certainly implement it without doing so). I'm not a purist striving to eliminate every use of a traditional Unix shell on my machine -- that would be a waste of my time.

Point is, I do not write shell functions and shell scripts anymore -- I write Emacs Lisp code instead.

I used to make heavy use of traditional Unix shells and other parts of "TTY world": from 1997 to 2005 or so, my only interaction with my computer, a Linux box, was via the Linux console. For the 5 years before that my only interaction with Unix and with the internet was through an old-school actual terminal and (later) and IBM PC XT running a terminal-emulation app and almost no other apps. But I've discovered, slowly over the years, that I'm happier writing Emacs Lisp even for things that are traditionally done with shell scripts and with shell functions defined in ~/.bashrc.

For many experienced Emacs users, Emacs is just another component of "TTY world". these users typically use Emacs in "text mode" or in "-nw mode" (i.e., without a windowing system) and perhaps they use shell mode, eshell mode or ANSI-Term mode, all of which pretty much require the use of a traditional Unix shell. But it's not difficult to use Emacs without making constant use of the components of TTY world.

>I don't really think Python is very good for illustrating either the theoretical or the systems-level CS concepts. It's a nice language for motivating programming and showing off how much you can do with little serious investment, but it doesn't really motivate learning Computer Science, i.e. learning Programming on a 'deeper' level.

Could you explain what you mean by Racket lending itself to algorithm complexity, recursion, etc better than Python? I really don't see why one or the other is more conducive in this respect.

> The point here is that it isn't a VM at all. It's just an intermediary platform-independent binary code.

PNaCl ?