I think associating programming with childish blocks is less of a risk than associating programming with menial, simple, useless tasks. Most people never get a

I think associating programming with childish blocks is less of a risk than associating programming with menial, simple, useless tasks. Most people never get a chance to develop a feel for iteration and emergent behavior, because they have to struggle with typing and syntax and tabs/spaces/braces holy wars. With Scratch, I can get 9-year-old with no math or typing skills to make an interactive system with realistic physics, that keeps iterating and simulating even when they let go of it. Some kids might treat that as an art class, and grow up thinking of programming as unapproachably childish instead of unapproachably strange. But others will remember learning a little about iteration, and object property accessing, and physics, and emergent behavior, instead of learning a lot about syntax.