[brudgers]

Between the two of us, you're not the first one to want to push their child toward something at age seven. For me that was about a decade ago. What I know now is that in a decade your child will still be a child and in that intervening decade they will have many interests and pretty much all of them will pass. Of the few of them that stick, maybe one or two will be constant and the rest that stick will come back occasionally for brief periods and then disappear for a few years.

In terms of occupations, who knows what programming will be like in fifteen years? In 2002, most people would not have expected pair programming and two pizza teams or Github's social coding to be mainstream methodologies.

[DamonHD]

As far I am concerned the core skills for programming (and the fascination) have not changed much in 40+ years, when my mum 'ran' my first ever typed-out Fortran program pretending to be what we'd now call a VM!

Writing a Z80 assembler space-invaders game for an MZ-80K then ... and 10 years of school and then AI+CS honours and then a MSc in theoretical CS and then 20 years of banking and Y2K type nonsense etc etc ... and now I'm writing code for something of about the same power as that Z80 again, though developing with nice compilers and GB of storage on SSDs rather than kB cassette tapes so can get rather more useful loc working.