I find that incredible. Long before I got to university I was been programming by myself with whatever editor I could find, edt, vi etc
I hedge that many of our students have never programmed "with a text editor" before because:
1. Many of them have used spreadsheets in higschool to build quite complex formulas, and spreadsheet formulas are turing complete, so they have programmed in some form of another.
2. I didn't want to discuss this here in order not to muddle the debate, but our introduction to programming course is now ran on Scribble[1], a dialect of the Scratch family. So many of our students in this data structures and algorithms unit have previously done just 12 weeks of programming instruction, and understand many of the concepts, but our unit is the first time that they have to deal with (for instance) syntax errors in textfiles.
Many people here in HN were teaching themselves programming by age 6, but to repeat myself: you are not our first year intake. We teach the students we get. These are not bad students: they are often hardworking and smart, and do well and learn a lot in our unit.
They may be ignorant of programming, but that's also ok, because that's what we're there for. And, to go back to the OP's topic, using Python as a teaching language lowers the barriers for access to the concepts that we really want to teach: complexity and big O, searching and sorting, etc.
I love python - used it for years, but I am dumbfounded that people enter a CS degree without having ever first tried to write a program. That's like taking english lit without having read a book before.
Groovy (the JVM version) is marketed towards programmers who already know Java, and its main use cases (e.g. manipulating/testing Java objects, gluing together Java apps, and scripting in Grails) make the syntax terser but the programmer still needs to know what's happening underneath at the Java language level or they'll quickly hit a snag they can't solve.
The only use case where they don't need to already know Java is Gradle, where the script for a whole project is typically 20 to 100 lines long, usually copied and pasted from another project, and only using a tiny subset of the Groovy grammar, i.e. the DSL which is the least Java-like, so programmers won't be introduced to Java by using Gradle.
I even tried writing a Groovy(JVM) tutorial a while back for those new to both Java and Groovy [1] but found I had to introduce most Java and Groovy concepts at the same time. Groovy only gives some syntactic tersity via collection syntax, closures (though now obsolete with Java 8), and getter/setter syntax, nothing more.
[1] http://groovy.codehaus.org/For+those+new+to+both+Java+and+Gr...
The world has 6B+ people and HN is a very very small portion of the world, just like USA and the UK.