Had I been that minister, I would absolutely do something similar to what Turkey did. If the goal is to get more students to become programming literate, then

Had I been that minister, I would absolutely do something similar to what Turkey did. If the goal is to get more students to become programming literate, then the last thing that I would want is to pick a random flavor of the day language, with some frameworks, and some "best practices" debated to the oblivion on HN or Reddit. I would want all schools have a pretty standard system, with identical software that works identically because the goal of that software is to act as a pen and paper in a class. It needs to get out of the way. Imagine the conversation had they picked C++ and do Linux. First, there's going to be a multi-year debate if we should be using Ubunto, Centos, Arch, until some pointy headed expert says "The future is in CoreOS!" just before everyone decides to standardize on Fedora. After that there would be a fight about versions, because everyone knows we should always run the latest. That's except for the group of people over there, that are refusing to run the latest and want to run the proven. Oh and they do not want to do C++, they hate C++ and say it should be Rust and since it is a Linux system and shadow IT is pretty easy on it, they are going to teach Rust! Or mostly argue about teaching Rust... etc... etc.. etc. Here's a thing - if 10% of students gets out of the Delphi environment and starts messing with GCC for any reason then the program already succeeded in achieving the goal.