What inspired me to learn programming was your last point: building things. That's why I think that people should be introduced to a loosely typed, high-level, forgivable language. Compiler errors and verbose code does not appeal at first glance, you need to draw people in..

I will never forget the moment 11 year old me saw a message box appear with text that I specified. I made that happen, I built it. I felt so powerful and cool. That 1 line of code in an obscure language got me hooked and over time I moved on to other languages.