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  yet I find the code practically in-understandable and the 
  language looks very complex

Well, then I wonder what these 'quite some languages' that you worked with are, because the language really doesn't look that uncommon or complex to me.

  I was also involved in CS education [..]
  And the language is really the last problem there

The people that created Pyret have been in CS education for decennia and have done a lot of research on 'how can we make CS education better'. Their conclusion was that the idiosyncrasies of the various industrial languages very much are the problem. You give to much weight to your own prejudices and subjective observations. The experimental results prove otherwise.

I think that's taking it a bit far. I especially don't see how being explicit about the problem you're solving (teaching computer science to newcomers in a collegiate setting) and focusing the effort towards that problem and iterating on the methods used to teach it (building better tools and iterating without importing unnecessary baggage) is "actively harmful."

Simply looking at text in a different language is not going to impart magical understanding. Things you haven't actually used in a non trivial program will seem complex at the beginning. And sure, you can rationalize that away by treating this like a special case, but it's just a general bias in our brains. And depending on your background, certain languages may seem more complex than others due to simply lack of exposure.

I'd rather propose putting it up to a damn test. Compare the computer science knowledge of outgoing students to other students in similar circumstances who were taught using a practical, heavily-used-in-industry language. Use a short test maybe, along with interviews to get at qualitative unknowns. The results of that could then be used to pick the best strategy to teaching going forward.

But also, in general, why not try to solve the problem better, without pre-supposing all the sunk costs and existing ideas? And not everything needs to be on the freaking altar of industry either. It's not like your college implementation of heap sort is gonna be mainlined in a company and used forever more. What're you optimizing, the couple of weeks it'd take for someone who already knows this to learn python? You already saved it probably by skipping the b.s. until it actually became relevant to learn about.

> I think that's taking it a bit far. I especially don't see how being explicit about the problem you're solving (teaching computer science to newcomers in a collegiate setting) and focusing the effort towards that problem and iterating on the methods used to teach it (building better tools and iterating without importing unnecessary baggage) is "actively harmful."

It's pretty clear that I was specifically referring to the language at hand and not to general idea/concept.

> ... needs this ... using it ...

There are so many examples of people who have learned a Lisp-family language in school and gone on to learn an industrial language later. This is a Lisp-family language with some syntactic sugar to make it look more Pythonic, basically.

Since when are Lisp-family and industrial languages not overlapping sets?

I was trying to come up with something less loaded than parent's "real languages" phrasing, to describe the sorts of languages commonly used in industry, like Java and whatnot.

Yup, I second that. Lua is much more simpler by comparison. Python is pretty easy as well. You can do lots of stuff with those two alone, not only on desktop/mobile platforms but on embedded devices as well (think eLua, Arduino, Pinguino).

What characteristics makes a programming language a "real" programming language?

The most important distinction would be that you don't have to make a transition from education contexts to production contexts.

I mean, why isn't it possible to design a language that is both quite fit for education & production? Is Python vs. Pyret really that big a difference in education outcomes?

This is important for professors & TA's, educators, or enthusiast parents who wish to teach their children. All have to master a toolset and environment prior to teaching others, and maintaining the environment is also an ongoing cost. Some of this cost will be assuredly transferred to students, so we want to be sure that a "pedagogical" language without production traction has such powerful gains that it offsets the losses.

Yes, it is a big difference, depending on what you're trying to teach. If you want to teach a conventional CS curriculum recognizable from the 80s, Python is great (though some people really prefer teaching with static types, which Python does not have and which are absurdly hard to add now). Here are several other differences: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189513

- has a standard library

- has library support for the usual stuff: strings, math, web, database, encoding, etc.

- written using a lower level language (like C, Rust, C++), self hosted (Go) or a mix of those (Dlang, Perl6)

- is actually used to build applications, has some sort of community around it (Rust, Perl, Python, Lua etc.) or some backing (Swift, Java, Go)

It's a real language if there are programs written in it where the where the main goal is what the program does when you run it, and not what the author learned writing it.

This is kinda like learning CS theory - kinda useful to keep in mind for other things, but never actually used. ie -> set theory, Finite automata, Turing machines etc...

Except there are numerous things Python can't do [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13189513], and at least as much harm comes from trying to push the round Pythonic snake into a very square hole.