Funny you mention that: the data structures course I took let us use any language we wanted. I chose python because I thought “hey python’s easier than C!” So I started making some tree implementation from scratch, and I kept having problems because I didn’t understand Python’s name binding system at the time, because I had no mental model of pointers or references or objects really. (Of course it was a shallowcopy/deepcopy issue). The next assignment I did in C and it was much more natural. Only later did I realize how meta and absurd it was to build custom dictionaries out of python primitives.