In my experience, kids recognize the brightly-colored sanitized tools as "not real" programming. The moment they hit the overwhelming UI or unfriendly error mes

In my experience, kids recognize the brightly-colored sanitized tools as "not real" programming. The moment they hit the overwhelming UI or unfriendly error messages of many environments, they feel under-prepared for "real" programming and take a hit to their confidence. I tentatively agree with them. If I can take a stab at what "real" programming is, it's when you can't expect everything to just work out of the box. You can screw it up in unexpected ways. Sure, that's demoralizing. But you either win or you learn, and I wonder if winning too much, too early prevents cultivating the mental ruggedness it takes to really program.