My goodness, I was 17 when I was first introduced to programming, punched card FORTRAN "IV" on an IBM 1130 ^_^ (academic year 1977-8). Which I found to be very

My goodness, I was 17 when I was first introduced to programming, punched card FORTRAN "IV" on an IBM 1130 ^_^ (academic year 1977-8). Which I found to be very neat, but sufficiently frustrating that I went straight to my local college's library (the machine was hosted at the college). In general, I agree with those who say that at this age he should play around with stuff he find interesting, and FOSS and Moore's Law makes that inexpensive. In the next summer wandering around the file system of a UNIX(TM) V6 computer for undergraduates went hand in hand with playing the Colossal Cave Adventure game. I learned enough UNIX(TM) from that, e.g. that system had a DECtape which started me on backups, which for some reason I find to be fascinating, to be employable when I was "dumped on the streets" in 1980....