I agree. Python is an atrocious teaching language. Its design is sloppy and incoherent, a patchwork of changes accumulated over decades.

The language has bloated into an enormous size. Python is no longer the simple little language it was back in the 1980s.

Smalltalk is a much better teaching language. In fact, I would argue it's the ideal teaching language...

Smalltalk was created to be a teaching language by Alan Kay and his team at Xerox PARC. It was small and simple and elegant. The language could be summarized on a post card!

In the half century that Smalltalk has existed, the language has remained small and simple and elegant. There is no cruft, no baggage, no accumulation of patches.

And yet, it continues to be a strong professional programming language. Smalltalk has major vendors in Cincom, Instantiations, and GemTalk. It's used by thousands of corporate customers around the globe.

Pharo is an exciting open source variant that is rapidly gaining popularity.

Smalltalk is also the ideal OOP language. It was the first language to popularize object-oriented programming. Does anyone remember the famous August 1981 cover of BYTE magazine?

By learning to program with Smalltalk, you lay the ideal foundation for all future programming education, including other languages like Python, JavaScript, Java, C#, etc.

Here's more information: https://richardeng.medium.com/why-i-love-rust-and-smalltalk-fb2a8845a6ba