So, in some sort of attempt to save this thread: what do you think about the intent of ``get kids to code at a young age?''
I started learning programming with BASIC at around 8 or 10, when I got access to my first computer, but I didn't do anything non-trivial until I was 15 or so (I spent lots of time doing Monte Carlo simulations of wars with randomly statted soldiers and seeing which side won, and which data-blobs were the heroes of the day). I think I turned out all right as a programmer, although I spent a lot of time learning from the wrong sorts of books until I got my first internet connection. Anyway, that's my history so you can see my biases.
There seems to be a growing idea that programming today is like reading and writing [not so] long ago: a skill that at one point was practiced only by a few, but will/should be adopted by everyone. I don't really have an opinion of this, but I do think they are going about it wrong, because every effort I've seen is devoted to getting kids to code ``webapps'' which necessarily introduces a shit-ton of infrastructure to hello, world. I guess it's because they want to attract the mainstream child audience to their lessons with the ``you can do something cool, too!'' tag-line, and writing four function calculators is ``cool'' because it's run through node.js instead of xterm/cmd.exe