[kahrl]

You went so woke you became ageist, racist, and sexist!

You literally could have stated: "There's more than one way to learn something. The older generation who grew up learning machine language think only way to get where they are is to walk in their shoes (uphill both ways)."

But no. You brought up age, race, and sex out of nowhere.

[wizee]

As an 8 year old, I had no interest in playing with children’s toys. I wanted to learn how to what the grown ups around me that I admired did, making professional looking things. VB6 and Adobe Flash were perfect for this circa 2002. They were professional grade tools that were easy to get started with but capable of sophisticated professional looking output. The drag/drop/drawable user interfaces or scenes of these programs was also great for a kid to make something interesting without getting too frustrated with detail. I enjoyed doing things like making clickable buttons change text on a label or pop up a message box or open a file. I also thought making menu bars for applications was so cool and fancy. Likewise, I enjoyed making simple animations with flash. I think the key is having a tool the kid thinks is useful/professional grade and cool (I didn’t find kids toys or kids software cool above the age 8 or 9) but also approachable for early gratification with results that can be seen.

[mahathu]

I totally agree with the sentiment of this comment, but what does skin color have to do with it?

[kahrl]

Some people need to inject race, gender, sex, age... into literally everything. It is the only lens with which they can see the world.

[martyalain]

I am an old man coming back to childhood and I am an amateur, not a smart coder. I just want to understand in deep and I discovered that lambda-calculus helped me better than Scratch. I just try to share this experience. Maybe I'm not alone in this case. You could have a look at this page http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdaspeech/?view=teaching, it was a good experience with a few children (and students in architecture) who where proud to build their own web page and play with their colorized names. In don't say "It's the way!" I just say there are several ways to learn code.

[Bancakes]

It's pretty offensive to make up this ageist, racist, sexist projection out of thin air. Who hurt you, who was this older white male programmer?