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What is also important is the number of kids you are trying to teach at a time. Kids > 8 then blocks mean that everybody is somewhat productive through trial and error, even if some are held back by the interface. Try 30 young kids with a standard text based language and you end up achieving very little in a single class.

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Especially if you have someone who is more hands on getting stuck on a cryptic interpreter error.

We are all likely familiar with the non-informative "syntax error".

All too familiar :) Semicolons are kind of an un-intuitive thing for the novice. And languages have more complex rules than "put semicolon at the end of every statement" :/

"non-informative "syntax error"" We as an industry really need to improve error messages. I got a new chip and pin card the other day, and forgot you had to go to an atm to activate it first. Error 2392729???? How about, "please activate at an atm"?

Maybe we need an "Informative Error Messages Day" every year, where we are all forbidden from working on anything except improving our products error message.

And i think that was what drew many over to Linux from Windows. At least now you got some error messages that made sense (most of the time, i have seen the kernel barf up non-informative oops related to DRI because of something Mesa was doing).

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