Scratch is the easiest way to teach programming to kids in a visual way. Much easier than VB, you can start at a younger age, but you can’t make real apps. You can however make games and control devices like the microbit.

The progression from there is python for those who want to control devices, or web dev for those more drawn to the visual design part. A missing piece is something for making games that sits in the middle of scratch and C++/unity. I don’t know how kids make that transition.

No wonder so many programmers stick to boring business apps! ;-)

I got into coding qbasic (meh) & amiga (yeaaah) game engines in the 80s.

Currently teaching kids with Computercraft, to manipulate virtual worlds rather than boring spreadsheets.

IMO that sort of computer work will be obsolete by the time today’s kid are grown.

I’d probably avoid more than basic coding in general anymore and focus on math-y stuff. Just my take on where need will be, and discussing this with education researchers, and other thinkers.

I have a hard time believing we’ll carry as much code from the last couple decades as we had to from the previous few.

So much of it these days is web ui’s with a short shelf life relative to foundational code we shlepped forward in kernels, banking, and complex industry systems.

I got into coding via Timex 2068 Basic, Z80/8086/68000 Assembly, Turbo Basic/Turbo Pascal Demoscene meetups.

Maybe coding the Arduino/ESP32 game boy clones is appealing to today's kids.

From my friend's kids, apparently python is the most common to start coding.

HTML/JavaScript. That has the shortest start-making-a-GUI story (plain JavaScript; React/Webpack/etc. absolutely do not have this level of accessibility).

I'd say Vue is a good stepping stone to other frameworks as well. I feel more productive using Vue than pure Javascript.

It is a good stepping-stone, but it still isn't on Visual Basic's level of accessibility

Winforms with C#?

Moding games