Yes, many of us here at HN were programming before going to university, or instead of going to university, but at Monash we are dealing with our first year intake, not with the typical HN commenter.

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.

[1] http://monofonik.github.io/scribble/