This isn't the first time something like this has been tried, and my criticism of it is the same: this isn't really "programming". When you create a learning l

This isn't the first time something like this has been tried, and my criticism of it is the same: this isn't really "programming". When you create a learning language, you're inherently taking a bunch of concepts from modern programming, and you're dividing them into two groups: things that you think are necessary for what the student is doing to be called programming, and things that aren't necessary. Somewhere along the line, Snap, and its precursor, Scratch, decided that text wasn't a necessary part of programming. The motivation for this decision seems to have been that they think that text is part of what scares some people away from programming. That may or may not be true, I don't know. But what I do know is that if you aren't using text, I have a hard time describing what you're doing as programming. Sure, a lot of programming concepts can be expressed visually. But rapidly these visual representations break down when you try to build anything complicated out of them, because you start having to do more complicated things along the way. Version control is tied to text: you can't revert part of your changes to a flow diagram easily. As you learn more about a problem domain, you decide you want to rename a variable? Good luck with find/replace without text. Or are you just going to drop the concept of a variable? What's the visual representation of a type? The result might be that you get people interested in something you're calling programming, but their interest is based on false premises. When you finally expose them to actual programming, all the parts that were too scary to show them to begin with are all there. All you're doing is losing them later. I think that BASIC did a much better job of this back in the day. It gave you a lot up-front, and to do this, some of the concepts weren't ideally scalable, but there wasn't really any upper limit to what you could do with BASIC. The result is that all those scary concepts were there, but you didn't have to confront them all at once. Eventually you'd have to learn that, say, turtle graphics aren't the way we really draw things, but until you learned that, you could still do everything you wanted, it was just a little slow. I got all the way up to writing code for real, full-sized robots in BASIC (albeit by that time I had started learning C++). There's nothing that would have stopped me from writing real-world applications in BASIC (and indeed, many real-world applications are built in BASIC). It may be that Snap or one of its ancestors will someday reach the level where you could build a real-world application in it. I hope that happens, and I hope it makes programming accessible to everyone. But for now, I don't think that what Snap teaches is really programming.