I have just watched the talk "It's Not You, It's Them: Why Programming Languages Are Hard To Teach" by Zed A. Shaw and he is very critical of Bret Victor's ideas, and also mentioned "Squeak Toys" and Scratch as examples of fallacies.
http://oredev.org/2012/sessions/its-not-you-its-them-why-programming-languag...
Though I disagree with nearly everything he says, it was still an interesting talk. I think that in many cases he subtly misunderstood some concepts. His complaint about the lack of formal studies, on the other hand, is entirely valid.
An example of his misunderstanding: he shows Bret saying "if a programmer can't see something, then she can't understand it". Zed then complains about mixing text and drawings and using rectangles as a problem domain while the important things are concepts like "for". I am with Bret on this one: if a person can't "see" how a "for" works, they won't understand it. Most people who get good at programming as it is now can see it perfectly in their own heads. Having a visual representation animated on the screen will help the other people. Zed just ignored the first case of seeing and says the second case is a fallacy because "normal" people have trouble switching between linguistic and visual modes.
-- Jecel