They are all more justified than the person who claims Swift playground on an iPad is the pinnacle of CS for Primary School.
I am, below, trying to imagine what an argument could be for any specific example to be worse than the previous ones.
One could make an argument that when the level of abstractions eliminate Turing completeness, they have eliminated an essential quality. (But this does not even eliminate Swift playground, I think, so in this case it does not apply.)
Or one could make an argument about a lack of program interconnectedness, which, I am given to understand, is very much a problem in modern smartphone and tablet environments. But I could be out of date and/or misinformed. Nevertheless, it would be a reasonable argument (and I don’t know if it applies to Swift playground on an iPad or not).
Very constrained environments, like Minecraft, can also be argued against on practical grounds – it’s simply too difficult to make something useful within them. Not technically impossible, just too difficult once you get up a bit in abstraction levels. In my opinion, this argument also applies, sadly, to BASIC: The lack of functions and other methods of abstractions is, I think, a killer.
Or one could argue (which I think I personally favor doing) that software freedom for end users is an essential quality which must never be lost, for reasons which are only tangentially based on what is good for learning. It is almost special pleading, but has its own reasons for doing so, and the logic, on its own terms, is sound.
But none of these arguments are insurmountable by some theoretical device and environment which avoids any or all of these specific criticisms. Therefore, I think that any argument based solely on the age and abstraction level would not be valid.
BASIC (essentially any 3GL) never wore such a veil. To suggest discrete logic and IC-level assembly compares to issuing commands via the LEGO Mindstorms protocol perfectly illustrates the chasm between learning and understanding.
Yes. That is certainly a good argument against that specific example, and it is one I agree with. But it does not apply generally.
> To suggest discrete logic and IC-level assembly compares to issuing commands via the LEGO Mindstorms protocol perfectly illustrates the chasm between learning and understanding.
But learning and understanding what? Why is it (as I imply that your argument is) important to understand assembly-level instructions when it is not important to understand the underlying electronics? Why is this level special?
In addition to all the general arguments I outlined above, there is one additional argument to be made against assembly language: In today’s processors, I am given to understand that these assembly language instruction sets are largely a high-level language, emulated by microcode – the assembly instructions you write have very little to do with what the processor is actually doing in a modern hardware architecture, and therefore teach you exactly the wrong things about how a modern processor works.