If you understand English, you already understand Python.

Python is now the most popular introductory language at American colleges, a recent Association for Computing Machinery study reports.

In an analysis of the top 39 computer science departments as ranked by U.S. News in 2014, the general-purpose programming language has replaced Java as the budding computer scientist’s first exposure to writing code. Eight of the top 10 CS departments (80%), and 27 of the top 39 (69%), teach Python in their introductory courses.

Invented 23 years ago, Python’s discovery as a great tool for first-timers has been more recent.