[ckpwong]

The question is, do people at large even want to do casual programming?

Stepping back, what does "casual programming" mean anyway? Automate certain repetitive tasks? Do some complicated calculation? Write a two-player tic-tac-toe? Make a Sudoku solver?

For the most part, "casual programming" for people who are not into the abstraction layer have been mostly done in Excel/VBA. Most people just don't realize that IS a valid form of "programming" (albeit a very limited subset of it). It's like people who play Angry Birds/Farmville (or Minesweeper in the '90s) obsessively don't consider themselves as gamers, even though they might have spent more time "gaming" than most Counter Strike "gamers".

On the other hand, if you want to dig more into programming, tools like Lego Mindstorm or Scratch teach the concepts rather beautifully. It makes moving onto an actual general purpose programming language much easier.