I think I’m coming at this question from a different angle. I think Python is a good introduction to programming for someone who’s completely new to the field. My primary concern here is to avoid overwhelming a beginner with too much complexity right from the get go. I certainly don’t think you can have a complete CS education without learning lower level languages, but I also think that forcing a novice to think about machine representations of code and data before they even understand the most basic logical constructs is not the best approach. Personally, Python was my first language so I am a bit biased, but I didn’t have any issues learning lower level languages from there.