> I honestly cannot recommend anyone who starts programming to choose Python as their first language, contrary to popular sentiments

> I think it may be better off to skip Python altogether and write your code in a statically typed language to begin with

Having a good REPL is a huge advantage for beginners (and expert users too), but I'm not aware of any (popular) statically-typed languages with a good REPL.

Despite Python's many faults, it's easy to install (especially on Windows), it has a large standard library, there are third-party packages available for essentially everything, it comes with a user-friendly REPL out-of-the-box, and it gives comprehensible error messages. I'm not really aware of any other (popular) languages with all these attributes.