My disagreement with them using scripting (python) as step one is the lack of teaching data typing early
Teaching types is very important. But Python is strongly typed: a string is not a number is not a hashtable. When it's important for performance reasons or consistency across a large codebase, you can add static type information to your Python code without overloading n00b brains with mandatory type annotations.
AND python's silly use space/tabs to set up structure instead of real {} or B/E blocks.
Nobody would accept code that was incorrectly indented (although some languages have more than one indentation convention, like C) in an assignment or pull request. And when looking at correct or mostly correct code, we look at the indentation structure, not the braces. That being so, having both braces and indentation is fundamentally a DRY violation.
Automatic data conversion has never been a good idea in my experience because like many things that happen magically, it almost never works as I expect.
I think it was a customer revolt that persuaded IBM to add "mixed-mode" expressions like "A + I" to Fortran IV; they had been disallowed in Fortran II. I haven't heard anyone saying we ought to revert that change.