Before I reply, can I just say the fastcode site is one of the worst reading experience I&#x27;ve had in years. Truly appalling.<p>For young kids, the problem with traditional languages is that you have to spend a huge amount of time dealing with syntactical issues like whitespace, nesting brackets, the right kinds of colons, singe&#x2F;double quotes, etc, etc on any non-trivial program. I&#x27;ve taught my girls (10 and 11) a little Python, but kept it small scale largely because of this. On the other hand they can create pretty complex interactive animations in Scratch without having to deal with any of that, because they can focus their attention on the logic and the functionality of the commands.<p>I suspect that once they get to 12 or 13 this will be less of an issue, and my eldest coped with the syntax issues better than her sister when writing a bit of Python, but when they first started learning Scratch at age 8 and 9 I think it would have been extremely challenging for them to use something like Python or BASIC.