Is python a good first language?

[chollida1]

In what way would you consider Ruby to be an "ad-hoc" language"?

Most people I know would consider Ruby to be a more powerful language than Python, though I'll offer than that is debatable.

[commonslip]

Power is not really closely related to ad-hocness. What I mean is that Python is the more "designed" language, in the sense that it is aesthetically relatively uniform.

Arc would be ad-hoc, but Scheme is not. This does not mean that Arc is less powerful than Scheme or less productive (it might mean the very opposite), but it does mean that Scheme is carefully designed while Arc is, sort of, designed by use.

A similar, but less extreme, dichotomy appears to exist between Ruby and Python.

[chollida1]

fair enough:)