What language do you think beginners should be learning that would not keep them from what you say is ‘cognitive effort, detailed typing and symbolic work, algorithmic thinking, architectural thinking, linguistic thinking’. Perl? And why is Python incompatible with those things?

Like many of us, I started programming with BASIC, not C or assembly, but I turned out fine. I don’t think people need to or necessarily can absorb all the high level details straight off. To me python seems well organized enough that it makes a great language for beginners.