My son, 17, learned to program in Scratch, and wrote a lot of games in it. Since then he has learned Python, Lua (in which he wrote a space invaders), and Java in both high school and during the summer at Cornell. He can write in these languages, but the problem is, he thinks in Scratch. He always goes back to write things in Scratch. In Scratch he has written a number of ray tracing and path tracing renderers which can model roughness, specularity, ambient occlusion.. He teaches me stuff about rendering that he reads from papers. Right now he is working on an NES emulator in Scratch that necessarily includes a 6502 emulator. It can load and play Mario games. But I can't get him move his ideas to a textual language.