Not a father, but very much interested in pedagogy of programming. I initially got interested in this because of the (now infamous) paper 'Camel has two humps'[

Not a father, but very much interested in pedagogy of programming. I initially got interested in this because of the (now infamous) paper 'Camel has two humps'[1]. Since then, the author has redacted his conclusions, but I still think the paper points to a very interesting thing, some people are different, they just don't "get" programming the same way we do (and this is hardly an indication of being less intelligent, but that there are different kinds of minds out there). My theory is that the main culprit here is Turing Machine architecture. That people who don't 'get' programming actually might like it better if they are taught lamda calculus based programming first. I tried teaching my intelligent non-developer buddy programming using a non-FP language which he absolutely didn't get, but when I tried teaching him lamda calculus that made a lot of sense to him, so I am interested in seeing more validation of this hypothesis. So my suggestion is that you try teaching your son any kind of programming, and if it doesn't work out then try teaching him the other kind. For FP, I recommend teaching him lamda calculus and this game [2] is a good place to start with. 1. http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf 2. http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/ http://worrydream.com/AlligatorEggs/