I'm a fan of teaching programming using block languages, but scratch has some serious issues. The runtime model of scratch is so much more complicated and divo

I'm a fan of teaching programming using block languages, but scratch has some serious issues. The runtime model of scratch is so much more complicated and divorced from the hardware that it can be hard to really understand what is going to happen when, and why. Also, once you get past toy programs on scratch, there's not really anywhere to go. Building large programs in scratch is cumbersome and error-prone, and methods of transitioning from scratch to a text-based language are pretty iffy. This approach of starting with a block representation of a common, practical language makes a lot of sense to me.