I learned to program on scratch in the 6th grade when it was very new, circa 2008. In many ways, it is more real than other learning languages.

In retrospect, the smalltalk influence of scratch I think left such an impression on me that I continue to love dynamic, always live environments to this day. The broadcast system is surprisingly powerful and forward thinking. I do recall it being a bit difficult to build up your own abstractions, but such guardrails I think are useful for learning and I usedd Scratch before custom blocks were available.