Python

I am going to start taking a computer programming class for school in a few days. In the first semester they are teaching python and how to use it to program a robot. I was wondering if python was a very popular and/or powerful language, or if it is just more of a base language to teach something more complex, like Java which they are teaching in the second semester. Any help is greatly apreciated and thank you very much.

Definitely,
Python is a popular -so popular- language!
It is not a base language, it is a full-fleged language like any language you might think of (Java, Ruby, C# ...)
http://www.python.org/about/quotes/
http://python.org/about/success/
And it is so fun to program with, so don't underestimate it.
You may have to check the Django framework one day if you are going to do web programming:
http://www.djangoproject.com/
Enjoy the charming Python.

THank you so much for your help! and i will!

Oh yeah, Python is great - my favorite language. Right now I'm programming in Java/JSP, but also have worked extensively with VB.NET, C#, C, VB6, and older languages, and Python is my all-time favorite.

It suffers from the lack of a good IDE and GUI builder. There's a way you can hack Python support into Visual Studio, but when I tried it, it had some limitations - incompatibility with some third party libraries I was using, so I was booted back to using IDLE.

If it wasn't for that, I believe it would have more market share by now. But for a gentle introduction to programming languages, it would be fabulous!

--Cindy

Speaking of IDE and editors,
You may want to check TextMate and JetBrains PyCharm.