I think the "thrill of turning text into action" might be an adult sentiment. I wouldn't write this off.
I decided I wanted to learn to "program" when I was 8, but I had no mentors, and no adults I knew could tell me how programs were made. I found QBasic lurking in the C drive, and got some books from the library, but without anyone to help my 8 year old brain couldn't get far alone. I got it to switch resolutions and draw some static pictures, but nothing else. I was frustrated.
Eventually I found and started playing with Games Factory, then Multimedia fusion from Clickteam, which is is sort of related to this, programming without typing. It was something my 10-year old self could understand on its own! I got a solid intuition of thinking in logic, and. Being able to set up some crazy causes and effects myself was really exciting. I made some "cool" stuff, for a 10 year old.
Once I found that limiting I tried to learn text-based programming again and by that time I was able to read code and puzzle out what it did from the concepts I learned. Maybe being a couple years older helped too.
I can't stand using tools like that as an adult, but without visual programming, I probably would've given up. Yet I paid my way through college writing Java/AS3/C, and now I made a living in games.
My daughter learned to program with Scratch. It is definitely the right approach for more visually-oriented kids. She created some cool (to her) games, and found it so compelling that she turned some of her friends onto Scratch, who also then created games. Playing each others games and looking at the "code" was an important aspect of the learning experience.
Don't get me wrong, I think that any environment aimed at children needs to be highly visual. One of the most common environments for teaching programming to kids used to be Logo. But it was still 'type commands' => 'produce visuals' and I think there is value in that. A lot of Logo wasn't even producing programs but seeing what crazy affects you could get through one line of "code".
Almost almost all modern programming environments, including JavaScript in the browser, require a lot of work to produce a simple visual.
However, Scratch feels like it does too much and becomes more like solving puzzles rather than creation.
