As someone who expounds often on the merits of statically typed languages for production code, I couldn’t disagree more with the sibling comments discouraging teaching children programming with Python. I think it’s the best choice.

I remember when I was a TA teaching CS 101 with C++. People constantly stumbled with types and compilation. Just the concept of storing a value in a variable and retrieving it again was too much for some people.

That is where Python will shine for youngsters. Variables, control structures, functions. I bet they will get to the point on their own when they’re like “what’s the deal with numbers and letters being different”? and then you can take their hand and say “grasshopper, you are ready to learn about C/integers/ASCII/floating point”.