I feel like VB is a "better" Python for beginners and F# is a much better Python for data scientists.

The tooling ecosystem in Python is just so bad that I can barely stomach it after spending the last 20 years in .NET. At times, when supporting analysts at work wanting to write a little glue code, I've found their main complaint about C# is "curly braces" (which seems like a really odd thing to complain about, but ok) and I've found it easier to teach them a little VB than to figure out whatever the hell is going on with dependency and runtime version management in Python.

And then, for the folks who go deep on Python for ML tasks, I've mostly found them caring now about specific libraries than the language itself. I then show them how .NET has equivalent or better libraries available and that a lot of the code-golf stuff they do in Python has a much cleaner version in F#.