Ask HN: Your optimal way to start Computer Science?

[adidum]

what better place to ask this question than HN? If you could do it all over again, how would you it? Imagine yourself in your early teen years, fully capable of self-teaching and already with a solid foundation of maths and sciences, yet you never really got into much computers technology (have not done any programming). But now you want to get into it, you have the time and want to make it a learning experience with the future in mind, rather than an immediate goal of being able to program on a language or two ASAP. At the same time you'd want it to have it moderately exciting, practical, that you can start using somehow computers in projects that a child is more interested, like robotics rather than pure software. How would you do it? What resources you'd use? Would you start with a functional language when you'll start applying the concepts you learn or not? This is not a hypothetical question, somebody needs your advise.

[mousa]

Are you sure they want robotics rather than pure software? For the longest time I was really put off of programming because of all the libraries and magic going on and people trying to show me the "cool stuff." It was cool stuff but I could never really get into it because I never felt I had a good feel of what was going on and there were so many components involved. I think if I was introduced to competitive programming earlier I would have loved it. Nothing messy to think about but the problems themselves and some kids might be motivated by the competition or puzzleness of it.

[shams93]

C is still useful to know, its not nice and clean and modern like Rust but C11 has some new useful modern parts. When I was a kid you had to be in the know to know about open source, I didn't have the benefit of seeing lots of other people's code and looking at projects back then, wish I did this ia a great environment for learning with all the free online resources compared to the late 80s BBS era.