Anyone else think this is related to the declining bee population?

"...as is any knowledge of any JavaScript libraries, because the author intentionally eschews them in her presentation" Who goes on a rant about how terrible IE6 is and also intentionally eschews all the commonly used solutions? What a disservice to readers. Honestly, I don't know a single programming who codes user-facing javascript without a library (like say jQuery) at this point helping you out with all the quirks and browser differences. It's pretty much a silly thing to do, and a massive waste of time for anything but the simplest scripts.

I agree with the comment about apples and oranges, but more specifically when dealing with kids you have to consider their attention span. If you show your son assembly language for his school science project instead of C#, is he going to be turned off because he couldnt do that little pop-up box trick he wanted to in 2 days? If he's really interested in "real programming", he'll learn it. I wouldn't worry about some Visual Studio tool limiting his mental abilities, after all it takes a fairly bright kid to see the simplest project through by themself.