I really sympathize with your points, but I feel like line-based text entry based programming is not something today's kids can relate to at all. For them web p

I really sympathize with your points, but I feel like line-based text entry based programming is not something today's kids can relate to at all. For them web programming is much more relatable and accessible. Their "hello world" is in HTML, and their first programs should be in JavaScript. You don't want the kid to face the horrors of the browser DOM APIs directly, so using jQuery or the like makes a lot of sense. But overall this will hold the kid's interest a lot more than text line-input based programming, since she's probably never seen a text-based program before and can't relate to it at all. That said, if the OP's neice is willing to "put up with" text-based programming, Python is a great environment.