> I think programming should enter a kids learning environment around the same time and priority as a second language. For a lot of people, than means learning

> I think programming should enter a kids learning environment around the same time and priority as a second language. For a lot of people, than means learning programming before learning english. Which is incredibly counter productive. It's like learning maths without pen and paper. Sure you can do it, but I wouldn't want to. Besides, there are only a limited number of hours in the day. Energy and motivation are also in short supply. You can't do everything at once, and even if you manage a bit of parallelism, you'll end up doing a lot supperficially. Better be sequencial. And prioritize. > How would someone know whether to consider it, if not exposed to it at all? Like I said, just like with music, you put it everywhere, and you associate it with joy. Play with robots, make beautiful programmable lights shows in the kid room, use games like turing tumble, program openly and talk proudly about the result, create bots to annoy the kid in social media, make your own "alexa" system that the whole family can abuse, lay around bare raspi you can fiddle with, etc. The idea is that you feel like the house in "honey I shrunk the kids". It calls for experimenting. > Most people in the English-speaking western world won't make a vast amount of use of that second language. First, that's not most of the world. Second, of course they would. It opens an entire different culture that make you think differently, grow differently. Sure, you can put a number on it, but it's huge, and it must happen soon, or it will unlikely happen at all. It's hard to learn a language by yourself unless you travel abroad, while learning programming alone is easy. In fact, if you have the money, sending your kid abroad in hight school or college is fantastic. > Most won't use their Chemistry or Physics education in day to day life, but it will help them understand the world better. And because you had to learn all that at the same time, most people don't understand basic physics, chemistry or maths. They don't speak a second language either. They lost everything, trying to do all the things. > As our world becomes dominated by software, training in it becomes similar - even those who aren't going to go all in and follow a career in it, can conceivably benefit from some training. Software is just regular life, automated and faster. Learn real life first.