On one hand, this is an awesome move, and if it became widely adopted it could bring millions of new students into the computer science field. That would be an incredible change for the industry and the future.

On the other hand, I fear kids will see programming as an “easy way out” of their language requirement. The classes could get flooded with kids who simply want to avoid having to learn a second language and think this will be easy. That could have a negative impact on U.S. citizens falling behind in knowing other languages, as well as possibly resulting in many lazy programmers who don’t really care about the field and simply want to do as little work as possible to get their second language requirement.