I agree, this doesn't make sense. Python especially strikes the perfect balance between learning programming concepts and being productive almost immediately in real-life. It seems like most of the problems the students experienced were lower-level CS details like types and pointers that didn't directly translate with the kinds of data analysis problems that they were likely be able to apply to their studies.

If they were CS majors I would entertain them learning the lower-level stuff first but not for what they are trying to accomplish.