A recent paper entitled "An objective comparison of languages for teaching introductory programming" - by Linda Manilla and Michael de Raadt - praises Python as a beginner's language: http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/upcerg/Publications/proceedingsKoliCallin... A comparison is outlined in Section 3, Table 2 in the above paper. The volume that contains the paper was just announced on the ACM-SIGSE list. It can be found here: http://www.it.uu.se/research/group/upcerg/Publications/proceedingsKoliCallin... Atanas -- Atanas Radenski mailto:radenski@studypack.com http://studypack.com mailto:radenski@chapman.edu http://www1.chapman.edu/~radenski