Not too sure what you mean. Frankly I haven't touched it for at least 20 years (prob 30) and I diodn't do much, just used it for a job that required it, so can't remember much more about it. But it's very popular in certain communities, including science and maths etc. I presume for a good reason, but I don't know, and can't be R'sed to look right now.
But the prankster thing applies to any source code you download, unless you go through it with a fine toothcomb. When you say manually change a field, what do you mean by that? Change it's name, type, I presume you don't mean value? Not sure I understand you.
Personally, for someone just starting on coding, I think the more fiddly stuff like manual memory management can make life rather hard. the bugs that it can produce can be pretty tough to find sometimes, and depending on the language, pretty destructive in terms of the session. Some people prefer to jump in the deep end, which is great, but others prefer to learn concepts first with easier implementation to start with, so you can focus on the aspects of the language itself that are of interest (obvious this depends on who and what they want).
Likewise, dynamic typing has advantages and disadvantages. And suits some more than others. Maybe depend on where they want to move on to, quite a few other languages are like that (don't like 'em myself, but that's personal choice, factors in favour of both sides).
In the end, there are so many reasons to choose a particular language, and without a pretty complete and tight set of requirements, whose to say what's best or not? How well Python implements object orientation? Couldn't say, but seems to have some value to quite a few people whatever the reason and is hardly immature by now, I'd have thought.
