>Sure Python is easy to read and easy to write, but that's not really the point.
That is the point. This isn't for comp. sci. students, this is for engineering students.
I know that in America, unlike other countries, "engineer" is a non-protected term and that lots of guys who don't actually have engineering degrees (such as comp sci majors) call themselves engineers.
But "actual" Engineers, i.e. the people who have engineering degrees or are in engineering programs, the people to whom this article pertains, are applied scientists. By definition, their professional concerns aren't the inner workings, or developing a holistic understanding of computers. That's for a specialist, i.e. a computer scientist who has more appropriate training. An engineer's job is to develop a solution that surpasses the design requirements (physical as well as budgetary) by the minimum amount. As a crude example, anyone with a high school education could, with unlimited funds, build a bridge that would stand up. But only a trained structural engineer can build a bridge that will just stand up.
I'm a mechanical engineer, and for people in my field the programming aspect is most often a means to and end; you're writing a simulation to give you better insight into solving a physical problem, or you're writing a program to crunch a shitload of data, or you need to plot things and present them in a particular way or output the results to a particular tool, etc. The performance of the algorithm or your code is not really paramount. If it's "good enough" then it's good enough, because the code you write is just another tool in your toolbox along with your digital multimeter, your impact driver and your wrench.
I recently wrote a quick one-off to iteratively determine the asymptotic limit of a set of physical functions with many interconnections and shared variables, subject to 4 different constraints and involving numerous irritating physical constants.
To write that program successfully, I don't have any need whatsoever to understand the intricacies of file IO, the specifics of how libraries are linked at compile time, or how the print function actually prints to the screen. All I need is for it to print a number to the console so I can compare it to my far rougher hand calculations. Anything else is a waste of my time.
Had I written that one-off in python, the knowledge that "print prints things to the console" would be perfectly adequate for me to do what I need to do in order to move on to more important things. The inner details just aren't important.