It depends.

I can have an intern up and programming basic Python in about 3 days from nothing. I have run this experiment multiple times with teenagers.

The nice part about Python is that I can gradually introduce them to new features as they hit the problems the features are meant to solve.

And, I WILL argue that Python's syntax is easier to keep in your brain. Somewhere on HN there was an article showing the grammars of various programming languages as connected graphs, Python was quite obviously simpler than just about everything else.

Possibly http://blog.nicksieger.com/articles/2006/10/27/visualization.... A comment links to http://flickr.com/photos/nicksieger/281055485/

asyncio is a feature, not a requirement. Most people will never need to use it or the threading library will meet their use case.

Every language will get more complex as you dig into it, but most people don't need to go beyond the surface.

The most basic things are hard to grasp also. I had a really hard time understanding what is the difference between unicode, str, bytes and how to encode what when I started with it 5 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14839028/how-are-these-s...

Nowadays, teachers have to start with generators and yield even for beginners, because most of the things are generators in Python3, which is not a trivial concept to understand when you have no programming background.

No need to use asyncio as a beginner. Not all problems require concurrency to solve. The vast majority of the automation scripts I write have no need for it.

I agree Python isn't simple at all, but I think it does have a kind of surface simplicity that its culture reinforces. 'one obvious way', etc.

Or to put it another way its a language you can do a lot with without caring too much about details.

Or to put it another way still you can go a long way with Python, Stack Overflow, and a bit of copy and paste.