I agree that involving beginners with OOP is a distraction -- albeit a very important principle. But they must be able to write their own modules, functions and classes first then be comfortable with exporting those then OOP can come naturally from that. Most software is still highly procedural in nature (while it may consume and refer to objects) and even in languages like Python where everything is an object you can still write software that has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end. Once you have a handle on all that, you can then start utilising the objects and their properties and that is huge fun in Python and Ruby.