Well, my sample size is also one: myself. I wouldn't say that Scratch was my gateway to programming, but I played with it a lot in my early teens. In my opinio

Well, my sample size is also one: myself. I wouldn't say that Scratch was my gateway to programming, but I played with it a lot in my early teens. In my opinion Scratch is very good, for the following reason: Programming is about achieving something by abusing the tools you have, right? (This is not all of programming, but I would say it's ~86% of it. You might call it technical sophistication). And for that, Scratch is wonderfull. The tools are colorful, easy to understand and while there are a lot, it's limited in size. You're learning the soft skills of programming with a lot more fun. What about the limitation? In scratch, you will explore the borders yourself and will have much easier time to understand why the solutions which exist in other languages are usefull ("Oh, finally I can automatically spawn a lot of the same object in") Limited, of course, to my own expierience...