So many apps are built to be extensible now that I'd say it's still completely normal to fall into programming without any special effort. Remember that in the

So many apps are built to be extensible now that I'd say it's still completely normal to fall into programming without any special effort. Remember that in the good ol' days, most kids didn't even have access to a computer. Now, any sufficiently internet-addicted teenager is bound to end up modifying something with plain text -- that's all it takes to get started. There's markup for forums, blogs and wikis, and that standard method for overriding the CSS on your MySpace page that's actually pretty gut-wrenching if you realize what's going on, but still, it's genuine CSS. Most sufficiently involved games have some kind of scripting capability, too. And you don't even need a proper text editor, much less a "development environment", to get started with any of this. I started out with Geocities and the "View Source" function in Netscape. Amazingly, even now that most of the Web has been tamed and the most popular websites keep most of the interesting code behind the scenes, browsers still have "View Source", web-based rich text editors still have an "Edit HTML" tab, and you can still quickly download all the static components of a public webpage, modify it locally, and load your creation in a browser to see what's different. Compared to the days of Windows 3.1, this is awesome. Then, consider the built-in interpreters that come with every modern non-Windows OS, package managers for finding and installing free libraries, free online documentation and even complete books on just about everything... if a kid these days can't get started with programming, it's because either they're not interested yet, or they don't realize they're already doing it.