Hi,

Aha - I had already written up a discussion of Python vs Matlab for
teaching, as we had something like this discussion in our department.
In case it's useful:

http://asterisk.dynevor.org/python-matla...

You might be interested in [1] for a discussion of 0-based indexing.
I haven't found indentation to be a major issue in teaching, and of
course it has great benefits for making code readable, which is
particularly important for a beginner. Introduction courses usually
don't cover object-oriented programming, I certainly don't. Beginner
installs are typically Anaconda, which provides all the basic packages
in a single installer. Python 3 is now the default for teaching, I
don't even mention Python 2 these days.

Python (and R) are particularly dominant in data science.

But - we'll see. I still bet Matlab will tick on, gradually losing
users, and that Octave will stay at roughly the same ratio of Matlab
users.

Cheers,

Matthew

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/tran...