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By now, I assume that I won't add anything new to this discussion, seeing already 256(!) replies.
The topic is actually one, I frequently rant over, when having a beer with my other aging geek friends.
As I see it, when we started with computers (mine was a TRS-80 Model I), we switched it on, and where ready to go. If it were python, we'd all learned that, but in that time, it was basic.
It got us directly attached with the underlying machine. 'peek'ing keyboard-values out of the memory-mapped IO, 'poke'ing characters into the memory-mapped screen, using in/out to access IO-Ports without the need to know how to open a device, or what the hell a viewport is.
So, if anybody would create a machine that boots into a python-interpreter, more power to them, and put lots of these things into the schools, so upcoming generations of programmers won't be completely ignorant of the underlying architecture of a computer, as it's quite common these days.
