Not the person you replied to but I'd say definitely not. It'd be easy to pick up bad habits from python (untyped variables) and try to carry them over to other languages. It's also the king of runtime errors, which will frustrate newbies.

I think a compiled language is a better choice for people just getting started. Java is good, IMO, because it is verbose. Eventually the beginner may get tired of the verbosity and move on to something else, but at least they'll understand the value of explicit types and compile-time errors.