Doug, thank you for the link to the article. I just spent a few days in Boston with CS Educators at the App Inventor Summit and the issues discussed in this article now make more sense to me.
The CS Principles project (csprinciples.org) looks like a huge step in the right direction. It "could" become the foundation of introductory CS courses in high school (AP) and in post-secondary. They have run 2 years of pilot courses and it looks promising. The next generation AP exam will likely be language agnostic - designs will likely be expressed in pseudocode and the course really engages with students (not just programming).
I'd always tell these people the same thing -- if it is only five lines of code then go write your own ActiveX object! Because yes, you are absolutely right -- it would take me approximately five minutes to add that feature to the VBScript runtime library. But how many Microsoft employees does it actually take to change a lightbulb?
The open source hardware platform Arduino has been the central platform of my electronics class since the beginning of 2008 and I've learned a lot in that time. I use the Arduino to teach some basic programming and introductory electronics concepts. This course led me to create a website (http://electronics.flosscience.com/) to help support my students as well as others who might want to use this platform in education. Now I'm ready for the next step.