I believe any familiarity with any programming language will provide a student with a step-up when they leave the high-school environment and enter college. Wh

I believe any familiarity with any programming language will provide a student with a step-up when they leave the high-school environment and enter college. While I am not excited about AP classes lowering standards, the Wikipedia entry makes it clear that it was discontinued because so few students were taking the exam. After reading the article, it appears that most of these organizations working with high school educators and their students arrived on the seen much more recently: Code.org started working with the College Board in 2015. What they are doing appears to be working: the number of students both taking and passing the test has risen. This strikes me as unequivocally positive. In my experience, Java is not the friendliest environment. For someone with zero development background, I can easily imagine that the IDE and tools themselves are intimidating, let alone the language with all it's jargon and (in many cases) self-aggrandizing techno-speak. Perhaps the success of these programs will get more development classes into high school, but I think that even this level of success is significant.