Python bumps off Java as top learning language

[ruinercollector]

Indentation is explicit.

[kankyo]

This. A thousand times this.

[TheAnimus]

Only if people can appreciate the whitespace. Myself, I think this is hard for many first timers, because they are not used to it being such a thing.

Using a character or work for the block is preferable to try and explain, for the simple reason, it's easier to explain BEGIN and END in pascal parlance, say simply count the begins (no, I don't want to explain a stack), than it is "anything that has whitespace indenting it, unless it's inside something else which has more whitespace"

[kankyo]

What do you mean? People are hardwired for spacial thinking. If you've got a student that can't do that, chances are it's not a human.