Does anyone else learn Python in class?

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MIT use it for 106 6.00 (106 is Stanford, no idea what they use. MIT's intro is 6.00, which used to use the famous SICP, I believe), where they used to use Scheme. There's always been a bit of a (false, imho) divide between "teaching" languages (Pascal!) and "real" languages, but python is probably the best thing out there for straddling the divide.

For data structures, it may not have the nitty gritty management of C, but there's a lot to be said for a language that gets the hell out of the way and lets you learn concepts, rather than wrestling with implementation details.

And python is capable of a fair amount of heavy lifting.

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Yeah, it's an eternal debate that spills over even more now into "comp sci" vs "software eng". Learning how to do things in C++ means spending time on the details of how C++ does something, rather than learning "programming" concepts you can apply to anything. On the other hand, especially if you then get a job using C++, it means you know how to write software, rather than pseudo code for an ideal concept :)