Strongly disagree. Use visual-progamming environments simply to get people into a mindset where they no longer believe programming is the sole domain of genius-wizards. After that, get them programming in a text-based language. Better still, start them off there.
Yes, I understand blocks, etc. are all Turing Complete and one can write programs in them that behave the same as any text-based language.
But it stunts growth and leads to bad habits. See also: