> "That's obviously anecdotical but I'm very glad nobody steered me into programming." Same. When I was growing up, we had a Commodore 64 and a small collectio

> "That's obviously anecdotical but I'm very glad nobody steered me into programming." Same. When I was growing up, we had a Commodore 64 and a small collection of programming books. (For the youngens in the crowd: Back in the day, software would sometimes be distributed in print form and you had to type it all in). As I learned to read, I also learned to type code (starting around age 5 or so). Likely one of the first chapter books I really spent time with was the C64 manual: http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-manuals/commodore-64-users-guide/ http://www.commodore.ca/commodore-manuals/commodore-64-users... I also didn't know how to fix errors, so any time I made a mistake I would have to retype it all. By default, on a C64 you can just start typing a Basic program and then type RUN to run it. So you'd enter something like: 10 POKE 53280,2 20 POKE 53281,5 30 PRINT "CHRISTMAS!" Then type RUN and it would run the commands. In the case of the above code, it would set the border of the screen to red, the background to green, and print CHRISTMAS! on the screen. > "I think my point here is that I'm not sure it is in the best interest of children to push them into our passions. Then again I'm not a parent, so my opinion doesn't hold much weight!" I think this is correct. My son has spent a fair amount of type with the faux-programming stuff they have for kids these days (Tynker, code.org, etc) and has enjoyed it, but I've been struggling to find a way to transition him to something more real without it feeling forced.