You are completely assuming that everyone who wants to program is intending to do so professionally, or that they won't be able to grow from a basic intro of "h

You are completely assuming that everyone who wants to program is intending to do so professionally, or that they won't be able to grow from a basic intro of "here is how to present your thoughts programmatically" and then cover the deeper subjects later, as they need to. This is especially relevant as we start teaching programming at younger and younger ages. I hope it's obvious that when kids start programming in 4th grade, it's much more intuitive to start them on Logo than lambda calculus... See, for example: https://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/ https://neil.fraser.name/news/2013/03/16/ Also, if you look at the amount of money that "Flappy Bird" made, perhaps making brain-dead iPhone apps isn't such a bad deal...