FWIW, when I interview technical candidates, I ask technical questions until I get to the point where the candidate says "I'm not sure" or "I don't know". That helps me understand where the are in their career. If a candidate knows everything then they're not being honest with me :-)
This is being said without knowing exactly which web sites you're talking about. You'd have to give examples to get a more precise answer.
Don't equate using something that works with following herd mentality. The reason something like Bootstrap by Twitter is used so often is because it "just works". If you are a start up with limited keystrokes before you burn out of money, then you focus on other value-generation parts of the business. I would rather get a halfway decent Bootstrap looking site (with tweaks) than spend money on a designer or time creating something that is different but I have no idea if it will convert well. In the meantime, I'll spend my time and energy on building new features. If the idea proves out, we'll loop back on the launch pages and do some A/B testing after the fact.
Yes, I think that really depends on the kid. Mainly I wanted to point out that there are plenty of learning vehicles that teach the programming concepts without necessarily being 100% text-based coding. For some kids that will excite them more. (That's also why I like WeDo Robotics and Mindstorm.)
Nothing wrong with going directly to programming languages if that's what the kid's into.
For an 11 year old, a more visual pseudo programming language (see Scratch or Alice) is more appropriate than jumping into something like PHP or C. Even Codea is a jump... but Lua is pretty friendly for someone seeing code for the first time.
My kids aren't passionate about sports but they play soccer. The question that I could have asked is 'what's the best league in my area to be in?'. I wouldn't expect that readers would jump to the conclusion that we were living vicariously through them.
At any rate, I thought it was a reasonable initial question. We don't push kids into programming, but we do make materials available when they show interest. That's why I'm familiar with what I posted. However a comment such as "stop trying to live vicariously through him" comes across as rather snide.
You'd recommend to an 11 year old to read a book "learning to code the hard way"? Really?
I think you're making a lot of assumptions with a comment like "stop trying to live vicariously through him". Would you have had the same reaction if the question was about sports?