[yoelhacks]

I think there's a very important real-world nuance here.

What you want with a programming language is to handle granular logic in a very explicit way (business requirements, precise calculations, etc.). What this article posits, and what I agree with, is that existing languages offer a more concise way of doing that.

If I wanted to program in a visual way, I'd probably still want / need the ability to do specific operations using a written artifact (language, SQL, etc). Combining them in different ways visually as a first-class operation would only interest me if it operated at the level of abstraction that visualizations currently operate at, many great examples of which are offered in the article (multiple code files, system architecture, network call).

[dhosek]

My son who started programming at 7 pretty quickly moved on from languages like Scratch and Tinker. To the extent to which he uses them at all, it’s mostly to play games that are available in them. I’m not entirely convinced that he couldn’t have just started with Javascript or Python. It’s not like learning the syntax for a for loop¹ is that much harder than arranging the blocks in one of those block languages.

⸻

1. Although I must confess that I have a mental block about the second and third components of a C-style for-loop and whenever possible, I avoid them if I can.

[nagonago]

> Although I must confess that I have a mental block about the second and third components of a C-style for-loop and whenever possible, I avoid them if I can.

Glad I'm not the only one! Despite programming for over a decade, I still mix up the order of `update` and `condition` sometimes in `(initialization, condition, update)` for loops. Probably because I spent too much time with Python and became so accustomed to only using `for x in y` style loops.

[dhosek]

It has definitely pushed me to prefer foreach style loops in my coding which, I think, makes the code in general better (and, when writing in rust, faster as the generated code is able to eschew bounds checks).

[roshankhan28]

tbh its pretty much a big thing when 7 year old is intrested in any programming language. i am not a parent but in this age of ipad kids , that is really impressive as a parent.

[Andrex]

Is Visual Basic still a thing? That was my start and it always felt like a good intro language. It was limiting but you could still make "real" desktop apps.