Agree on this. That's a big problem I have with using Python. There are so many ways of doing things (this is also mentioned in the paper) it is almost impossible for the students to do it properly.

I think the problem with teaching languages is also of neurological nature, basically "student motivation is what drives learning success". Our brain constantly filters out non relevant information. A teaching language, having no use outside of the course, scores very low on relevance in our brain making it very hard to learn and find motivation.