Specialized kid features are less important, even to kids, than the "boring" adult features like reliability, documentation, examples, support, libraries, and s

Specialized kid features are less important, even to kids, than the "boring" adult features like reliability, documentation, examples, support, libraries, and so on. TFA's experience mirrors my own: when I started programming, people kept trying to get me to use tools that promised to make my life easier (basic, logo, apple script). Without exception, they made my life harder, because their gimmick added less value than their lack of "production grade" polish took away. C was a breath of fresh air -- not because I had a fetish for segfaults and the clockwise spiral rule, but because good APIs and documentation and examples and debuggers were available, and that was much more important. Today the situation is reversed: I primarily code in python which has sugary syntax, doesn't enforce types, has poor debug/profiling/ui tooling, and still struggles with multithreading 20 years after the death of Dennard scaling. However, it's the lingua franca of the ML/AI space, and that matters more to me than all of its many shortcomings put together. Ecosystem > language. Every time. It's true for kids, it's true for adults, and I bet it's true for space aliens, too.