I hope you stick around Thomas. I'm one of the old timers here but not a list owner or moderator. My initial recruitment into Python was through my search for ways to do 3D (spatial) geometry in cool ways + Guido's on-line CP4E essay. The web was just getting going and there was a paucity of polyhedrons out there in jpeg or gif format. I used to count how many. Later when it looked like I was using the term "CP4E" in new ways I changed it to "P4E" (dropping C) to distinguish it from Guido's, and "HP4E" which is kinda technical (hexapent is a way of dividing the surface of a sphere, new book called Divided Spheres, a primer to Ed Popko, has me in the biblio). As far as Processing goes, my ears perked up at a party recently, some young and cool dudes chatting, one of them raving about Processing. I wanted to but in but wasn't sure how, so I just listened. I've admired how Ruby may be used to program Google Sketchup. "What might Processing do *for me*" I wonder, greedily rubbing my hands. My general sense is we don't need to shield students from nasty aspects of whatever languages as they'll initially / naturally want to try many, and we should encourage that adventuresome impulse that says "I'll trying anything once". They'll inevitably encounter VBA, old (even new) FoxPro code, lots of Java in the course of bouncing around in our worlds. We hope also Scheme, maybe even some J who knows. I've got Haskell running on my Mac finally, and find lots of similarities with Python, even though they're across the "static typing" divide from one another (their both typed, just Python's type system is more open to duck types). New languages are coming along. At the latest OSCON, it was all about Go for me (the new language). I'm mostly just dabbling, as my training has encouraged me to do. Python brings some gravitas to the classroom in that we already see it as "world dominating" in the sense of having lots of real jobs doing important stuff in many walks of life. Python is a masterful invention, used with appreciation by code wranglers around the world. There's an analogy with English: would as many people attempt this difficult language if it was only the great poetry and Shakespeare at the end of the tunnel. No. It's worthwhile to learn because it's so widely used for everyday communications. Otherwise why put up with all that crazy spelling with idioms galore. English is like the Perl of human languages, concise to the point of cryptic mixed with verbose and out of control (the skill of the coder matters so much -- in Java they tried to make the boilerplate stronger). My own freshman course in programming (engineering department) was a wild ride through a whole bunch of languages: FORTRAN, APL (my favorite of the bunch), PL/1, SNOBOL, LISP, Assembler (simulated). Not much OO because this was 1970s and Smalltalk was not running on our IBM 360/370 I don't think. I had to pay visits to PDPs and other labs to try other tools, such as Tektronix graphics terminals (with and extended version of APL as I recall), really rad. However this was just me being "well rounded" as a liberal arts kinda guy. I was anchoring in the philo department (Princeton had a good one, but the engineering was good too). Anyway, to make a long story short, POV-Ray was the free renderer of choice, available on CompuServ with its own kind of Open License. To write scripts for it, though, was tedious, so the job was to use scripting languages to spew out "scene description language" (plugging values in to boilerplate). That became a back end for VRML output as well. The kind of coding I was doing anticipated a way more mature project called AntiPrism by Adrian Rossiter, which I believe was used for many of the pictures in the Popko book cited above. Kirby