Should we teach high schoolers Scratch?

I agree.. I am sorry about the flippant comparison. It was probably unfair to scratch. My frustration with Scratch stems from watching kids (including my own) being taught it in school as the de-facto option and learning absolutely nothing about programming or anything useful in the process. Perhaps it is due to bad instruction.

For the amount of time and energy invested they would have been far better off learning a "regular" language like Python. Anyway just my 2c.

I don't think it should be stigmatized, I just feel that it's utility among older students, at least those interested in STEM, is limited. I've seen that with one of my own kids, hearing him complain about classes taught in visual block based languages being unable to switch to the coding based language to do things more efficiently.

>Harvard even uses Scratch in their CS50 course!

Even ignoring the 'appeal to authority' fallacy, I believe they only use scratch as an introduction to the concepts, it isn't even mentioned on the Harvard page for the larger cs50 class.