[seabird]

Yes, you can hook up a laptop to a TV. Then you'll sit down your eight year old and explain all of the messy tooling and errata of :insertlanguagehere:, and after multiple hours of stumbling through an IDE with too many features for them to comprehend (or a CLI environment that simply frustrates them), they'll say "damn, this sucks."

It was without a doubt significantly easier to start programming when the process consisted of hook the Commodore up to the TV, plop in your disks/tape, and write in a dead simple language that can be largely described in a few short pages. We haven't had anything like that for years; a spiritual successor to BASIC on a set hardware and software environment (the Switch) is as close as we'll probably come in this day and age.

[komali2]

Almost every old wizard-level programmer I've talked to started off by being massively inspired by the ability to program games when they were kids.

A teaching technique as old as teaching - find something the kid is actively interested in and excited about, and sneakily teach them stuff using that.

[noir_lord]

Not wizard-level but I got started programming on a ZX-81 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Si...)

Which was a few years old then, the games such as they where never held any interest but a machine that could be told what to do was magic to me.

I could write programs on a ZX Speccy before I could read (properly) and that started a life-long love (and career) in software development.

[fsloth]

I introduced my 8 year old to Scratch and he loved it. But generally games and videos they could be enjoying on a device are so distracting in my kids minds they are not really interested in the concept of further education in the subject. They'd rather play Minecraft. Which is totally fine, not anyone needs to be a programmer and I'm not going to jepardize any internal motivation to the subject in the future by being overtly persuasive about it.

[makz]

Check out pico-8