I've tried Alice twice before, but each time it's been met with rage and hostility. Scratch is very well-organized and intuitive, but Alice makes it hard to do even simple things. The first time a student asked about adding two numbers together, we had to resort to a Google search to find out how!

It's very frustrating to know what you want to do, but not know how to express it.

I was considering Java, C++, Python, and Perl. I dismissed Java and C++ for being too complex. And I know Perl better than Python, so that clinched it.

Perl is huge, but you don't have to know all of it to do useful things. For the kind of projects we'll be doing, we probably won't even need regular expressions. So no need to cover those, for example.