Sim City, OLPC and Python

Don Hopkins, the original author of Sim City, has updated the Tcl/Tk/X11 version of the game (now no longer commercially available) to the OLPC platform. He plans to clean the code up some and then replace Tcl with Python! He says

The long term goal is to refactor the code so it can be scripted and extended in Python, and break out reusable general purpose components like the tile engine, sprite engine, etc, so kids can use them to build their own games, or create plug-ins and modify the graphics and behavior of SimCity.

This might do more than legions of commercial systems to boost Python's popularity, and I applaud the vision that lies behind it. Overall I have some serious philosophical doubts about the OLPC project, worthy though it seems, but its aggressive adoption of Python has certainly raised the language's visibility.