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Given a choice, young children will usually choose to be in a natural environment. They want to be outdoors, in the fresh air and sunlight, barefoot and naked, surrounded by grass, trees, and flowers, hearing the birds and the wind, playing in water with sticks and rocks.
Having a place where they are physically, socially, and emotionally secure is imperative for healthy development and a successful future. Children who feel a connection with their caretakers and their home go on to exhibit fewer at-risk behaviors later in childhood.
[1] Optimal conditions include a safe and well-organized physical environment, opportunities for children to play, explore and discover, and the presence of developmentally appropriate objects, toys and books.
Safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments are essential to prevent early adversity, including child abuse and neglect, and to assure that all children reach their full potential.
There is actually a browser-based Logo interpreter in Javascript.
http://logo.twentygototen.org/
I strongly disagree with the people who say seven year olds would have a hard time learning new syntax. This is completely backwards. Try teaching pig latin to a seven year old and to a thirty something non-native English speaker. Or try traveling in a foreign country with your kids. See who can chat fluently with the natives after a month (hint: it probably won't be you).
Kids pick up on arbitrary linguistic conventions much faster than us gray hairs do.
I learned how to program when I was 10 in exactly the way you taught your son. My dad used the GW-Basic interpreter that came with our AT&T PC6300, and we wrote a game where the computer asked you a question, and you had to answer A/B/C. The big advantage to syntax in GW-Basic was that you didn't have multi-line statements. You might want to try something similar. Java, with it's curly braces, might be a little tough.
Example code:
10 PRINT "What color is Big Bird?"
20 PRINT "A. Blue"
30 PRINT "B. Green"
40 PRINT "C. Yellow"
50 INPUT$ ANSWER$
60 IF ANSWER$ = "C" THEN PRINT "Good Job!" ELSE PRINT "Oops, wrong answer!"
I spent hours upon hours using various permutations of that syntax and writing my own "games". And it made me want to learn more... might help.
Tell him about parsers. You just need to add context and reasoning to why things exist. The curly braces are so that the machine that reads the code knows where things start and stop.
I find that most people including children pick up things easily as long as you explain the purpose of them. This is why school was a terrible failure for me, no-one ever explaining the point of learning half the stuff.
Scratch is another one. Developed at MIT specifically for the purpose of teaching programming to children.
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