For me it's the glue that controls the events that invoke the state transitions of the (more or less) optimized parts of a system.
And for many things you can get away without optimized parts. So as long as you don't mind the whitespace... ;) For kids though, I'm unsure, if Python's the right choice.

Java is covered by android and C is covered by jailbroken iDevices. PHP you can do on both, I guess (at least you can on ios (and here's some more, so you stop trying to troll me about that.

Now you said: "Un-jailbroken iOS not so much, as its strict W^X policy and App Store Review Guidelines make on-device compilers impossible." And, while technically correct for the jailed devices (not counting the stuff, where you need to be online), you ignored the availability of interpreted languages (most of them turing-complete) on iDevices, which, suddenly, are the only ones available.
So, why don't you ask that teacher from TFA to VB your $200 pee-cees a Winblows app that takes them on a trip to somewhere damp and dark together with the toolchain, as they're evidently unnecessary to teach kids programming these days?

Admittedly, I have no idea what to tell you about the kids, who don't own a smartphone, but have a console, apparently they're his target audience. Maybe he should create an account on MS Zone (or however it's called these days) and try to upsell them VB there. I wish him luck! He'll need it. ;)

All valid points.
And I should have, of course, clarified, which efficiency I meant. For glueing stuff together, it is quite all right, as are most other current scripting languages.

You have outdated information:
e.g. https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...
and
http://omz-software.com/pythonista/

What do we need? A Number (i.e. Int), a character, ...
What is this? This is the number five.
Int aNumber = 1;
What's Yoda here?

Why do you want to scare the kids? They want to sit in front of the computer trying out things. Not listen to a (potentially boring) lecture by some (potentially opinionated) (high-)school teacher.
There's so many great languages to dive right into and have fun on the first day, like logo, scratch, even processing, and further, C and Java fit the bill. But theory? Let them learn it by doing it.

Great quote, and insightful conclusion. Amen.

It ate my < >s
Hey Dice, how about you merge some of the UTF support back in from Soylentnews?

SCNR.

I suggested processing in another post. Best of both worlds.

Welcome to 2015. The age of smartphones and phablets.

Just give them a good editor from the get-go and it doesn't really matter. Learning about manually managing your memory is arguably important as well and (the basics) easy to teach.
Processing is a good alternative, btw. Easy and you can do *lots* of fun stuff with very little code and explanation. You also start with a boilerplate.

FTFY. It's a scripting language. Can be a decent one (e.g. if you don't mind the whitespace), but still a scripting language.

You can code on a smartphone. If you want to.
In this regard C, PHP, Java and Python are much more accessible than VB, which you can maybe write on a smartphone, but not compile.

FTFY. Standard Samewrung practice, nothing to see here. Move along.