[elangoc]

The simplicity of the visual language that Scratch provides inherits from the simplicity of Lisp, via Logo. The Logo language (& the Mindstorms pedagogical philosophy), which is what Scratch builds off of in a visual way, was implemented as a dialect of Lisp.

From anecdotal experience, I do believe that the choice of a Lisp for Logo was an important criterion in the simplicity of the language, and thus the high impact of the learning impact.

I do think that if we find Scratch useful and powerful, then we should really re-/consider Clojure as an important language for real general purpose programming work, for many reasons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3-53JoGPE4