I've done some Processing with both of my kids. One of them also did a ton of Scratch, which is very different in a bunch of ways - and he seemed to spent a lo

I've done some Processing with both of my kids. One of them also did a ton of Scratch, which is very different in a bunch of ways - and he seemed to spent a lot of time wrestling with the fundamental limitations of Scratch. It felt so specific to Scratch that I often felt like what Scratch led to was, well, more Scratch - and also getting caught up in the politics of putting things up on their public forum. I felt that both Processing and Scratch certainly hit the 'fun' point, and that Processing also had the advantage of being a lot closer to actual coding. I imagine that there are probably also JavaScript setups that might tick some of these boxes too. Folks getting huffy about the fact that people aren't learning metacircular interpreters or assembly code (or logic gates!) right off the bat forget that (a) even the basics of solid imperative programming, and the inexorable way the computer does what you told it to, not what you "meant" is hard enough and plenty to get started with and (b) computing is one of many things people could be doing with their time, and making it shitty and esoteric and unpleasant to pass some purity test is not going to necessarily attract the people you want in the field. Notably the latter point - weird culty languages, ultra-low level approaches, etc - are going to filter out your students down to the people who knew from Day 1 they were going to be computer scientists. Nerds, like me. This is by no means going to filter people down to the 'best possible student cohort'.