[steventruong]

Disagree on Scratch or Alice being necessarily better. At 11, he can certainly jump into languages like PHP or Python perfectly fine. Many programmers (including many here) started a much younger age than 11 and at a time when Scratch or Alice may not have been available. There's nothing wrong with going straight to those.

[yShrike]

Yes, I think that really depends on the kid. Mainly I wanted to point out that there are plenty of learning vehicles that teach the programming concepts without necessarily being 100% text-based coding. For some kids that will excite them more. (That's also why I like WeDo Robotics and Mindstorm.)

Nothing wrong with going directly to programming languages if that's what the kid's into.