I've met people who started coding when they were 6 and have now compounded all that experience as they've gotten older. To me, programming is as much a skill

I've met people who started coding when they were 6 and have now compounded all that experience as they've gotten older. To me, programming is as much a skill to me as learning music or writing is. Sure, in industry some domains are learned/appreciated with age but that's considerably easier to pick up once you've mastered the abstract skill of programming. To draw analogy - composing for a genre/or emotion is a lot easier once you've mastered composition. Similarly, once you've mastered scales, arpeggios and rhythm becoming proficient in pop, jazz or classical will be comparatively painless. There are many difficult programming domains that people can get pretty good at well before they reach adulthood. Game design can span logic, rules, systems, product, testing, performance, graphics and physics. Compilers and programming languages can be grokked before uni too. Crypto also provides a gateway to web and distributed systems. Having met people who have compounded their life by learning programming XOR music (two skills I have personal experience going deep in) it is hard to comprehend how vast the difference becomes until you've seen it firsthand. At the extremes you have mozarts who compose from age 5. But even less extreme you have people like Zuckerberg or lexi-lambda building impressive programs by adolescence or Justin Biebers making music around 12. In any case, I'm also pretty confident domain acquisition can start young given that I've met people who were trading from young teens. Ultimately, school curriculums and age-based learning doesn't cater to individuals and can be artificially limiting of potential. Everything I've seen suggests that coding can be acquired from a very young age and then frees the individual up to learn all the ancillary bits as they grow up. What's unusual is we live in a time where there exists a vocational profession that pays well and isn't locked down by accreditation. (compare that with law and medicine for example)