Scratch is pretty much a traditional text-based language, but with a structure-aware drag-and-drop editor. Maybe you can't quite literally build a compiler for

Scratch is pretty much a traditional text-based language, but with a structure-aware drag-and-drop editor. Maybe you can't quite literally build a compiler for the bare text...? It's at least mighty close to being doable. That would make a great transition. You could also make a similar drag-and-drop structured-text editor for a fairly large subset of C.