They take kid friendly too far. I was maybe 6-7 when I first encountered QBasic. The key thing was that the documentation could be accessed from the editor. It was comprehensive enough, with plenty of examples, that I could write simple silly graphical and midi audio programs with ease, in addition to text based adventures. I think the closest spiritual successor would be Python.
I still remember it as one of the most user friendly environments by far.
Ok, but I didn't mean Scratch per se, rather the style of Scratch, and if it's useful for learning. MIT has taken over Google's App Inventor for example, and there are others like that.
