As I explained to a friend who was doing a python data science course, the beauty of Ruby and Python are that they get pretty damn close to the semantics of your code. As such even someone who doesn't understand the language could have a reasonable stab at trying to understand what's going on.
The bad side of this is that that syntactic sugar and other magic obscure what is really going on under the hood and can funnel students down false assumptions about how a language works.
Personally, I'd recommend Scheme as a first language, but apparently that's far too arcane for some...