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It should be noted that France had a nice, Papert-style "programming" curriculum centered on Logo in the eighties. Specific computers (hey, it's France) were developed, such as the Thomson TO7.

And then... Nothing.

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You forgot OCaml, our national pride ! Our CS researcher have a large expertise in proofs and static analysis with Coq, Coccinelle and the like.

yep, and TurboPascal and Delphi ,then I moved abroad to study and I didnt even know C ...

I was part of that generation. IIRC most kids didn't give a damn about it. At that age everything is just a weird random novelty. It was exciting for the device though, TO7 and lightpen were cute. Beside in the 80s, computers weren't a thing, even video games were barely established at home. And LOGO didn't feel like programming, turtling was felt more about geometry (left is down if facing left) than anything else, at least to me. We didn't really go into iterations and such.

I hope the new effort will use books like Code http://www.amazon.com/Code-Language-Computer-Hardware-Softwa... or something similar that don't take a macbook air for granted but instead use down to earth first principles that can be shown, built and tested with kids hands.

For slightly older kids, wishing for HtDP inspired classes.

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