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.