When you're that age you're entirely goal oriented. You don't care about structure, you don't care about speed. You wanted to hack Mech Warrior 2. You had a ver

When you're that age you're entirely goal oriented. You don't care about structure, you don't care about speed. You wanted to hack Mech Warrior 2. You had a very specific goal, so whatever language helped you do that the easiest would be the right one for you. Whatever language and toolset is the easiest to get to the point where programming is fun is the right language for a kid. Actionscript was actually great for me. I wanted to make flash games, and back in the AS2 days you could add code to frame 0 of movieclip objects. It was ugly, but it was the easiest way to get something to happen. It also tricked me into learning a form of object oriented programming.