The point about a static site generator being an ideal intro project is well-taken. I’m working my way through Practical Common Lisp right now, as it’s recommended as one of the best CL intro books, and its intro project of an MP3 database is only barely relevant to me because I still have a stash of MP3s I started building up around the time of the book’s original publication.

I struggle to imagine what might supplant the HTML generator suggestion in the future. If anything, its desirability is made more apparent by the proliferation of JS monoliths all over the Web. You can show students how quickly it renders compared to a corporate website or heavyweight social-media feed, use that as an introduction to performance considerations and profiling, introduce modularity by bolting on a more dynamic framework piece-by-piece…

The English national curriculum exposes every child to programming of some sort. 10 years ago it was 8yo kids learning Scratch, all of them.

I posted about it at the time: it turns out scratch is probably the answer, scratch is probably still the answer

in high school maths and computers they learn python.

my kid has no wish to become a professional dev, but can wield python as is useful to them.