What exactly is the point the author is trying to make? From the title, I expected a coherent argument but what I've read therein sounds more like "As an adult, I do not enjoy this thing meant for children." with little substance to why that matters to children.

I learned to program when I was pretty young, the only time stuff like scratch makes sense is kindergarden when you're still learning to read (for me it was the mindstorms stuff.)

I was using Turbo Pascal when I was 11. Many children are way more interested in "adult" conversations and tools than educators give them credit for.

> I learned to program when I was pretty young, the only time stuff like scratch makes sense is kindergarden when you're still learning to read (for me it was the mindstorms stuff.)

> I was using Turbo Pascal when I was 11.

Ignoring the fact that the whole stack was way much easier back in the day (I was a Turbo Pascal user as well at more or less your age), to me it's also a pretty clear case of survivorship bias. There will be kids that will find their way into no matter what, but we should also give tools/resources to help other kids without the same level of interest+capabilities to at least scratch the surface.

I absolutely loved Turbo Pascal as a kid and hold that IDE as the golden standard still to this day because of its simplicity. I think what we need isn't visual tools, we need an extremely simple IDE where you press one button (F5) to run your program without leaving the environment and without any clutter.

I wonder if Turbo Pascal was any easier to get started with than Rust would be with the right GUI toolkit and IDE.