Career Day - A parent introduces programming at her son's school
The argument for not teaching children scratch. 
"You don't need to start kids off on some fake programming language like Scratch."<p>I have no real affection for scratch, but I feel that he was making the argument that children should learn to program in an environment that models (at least to a point) the one in which a developer develops in, at least with regard to language preference.<p>I feel at this point, the language choice (barring ease of use etc) is pointless. Whether you use scratch, python or Haskell, if it piques the interest of a child, then nothing will stand in the way if that student wants to go on and learn every programming language available.<p>If you think of the first language you ever learned, and what you are now programming in. For me, my first language (a type of kiddy basic) gave me what I needed. A concept of execution flow. How to make things come up on the screen, basic 2d programming and it made it very easy to make some GUI based stuff.<p>My point is that don't hate any language (even if it is a <i>fake</i> language like Scratch) if it builds the initial building blocks in a child (or adults) head.