[FennNaten]

I'm not convinced. The existence of "complex" features in a language aren't an issue IMO as long are they're not shown right away. You almost always present to beginners variables, functions, conditions, loops, basic types and one kind of list, and let them play with that. They'll quickly get the gist of it and be wanting to do something actually useful... The scary part is not usually in the language itself, it's at the boundaries: interaction with the APIs of the platform it's running on, UI manipulation, file read/write, etc. It's hard to build anything useful without I/O, and that's when things start to become hairy. That, and when you have to master abstracting things away, which comes pretty fast.