I somehow missed https://www.hedycode.com until now, an environment that tries to teach programming over multiple levels the way we teach reading or math over multiple levels. Have others seen it or played with it?

I've seen it before, yes, but didn't play with it. Seems like this is well aligned with the anti-goals we all have (ie: current programming suuuuucks)

It's actually an interesting complementary take. Reading between the lines, it's not current programming (they're still moving towards python) that sucks, but just the way we think about what programming is (as evidenced by how we teach it). For example, is it possible (the best of) current programming is fine if only we did a better job teaching newcomers to visually chunk what they see on screen? (And refactoring current codebases into better chunks. And providing codebase-specific curricula to show how to chunk domain-specific patterns. Etc.)

Thanks for sharing @Kartik Agaram. I watched the whole little video from Felienne, and I loved the ideas! There’s one part in where Felienne demonstrates an issue introduced by lack of syntax:

color is blue
print my favorite color is color

This was such a cool example! Because, yes the syntax is too limited at this level, and the computer gets confused. But, that mistake is the learning process which then justifies why you have to use single quote chars to separate variables and text!

I like Felienne's talks and recently also bought her book: https://www.felienne.com/book. I like that she goes into the cognitive aspects and various source of confusion and friction. The thought experiments useful here could be: 1. Would these problems still arise in <your programming system here>? 2. Does <your programming system> make some chapters in the book less important (or obsolete)?