[lifehacked]

I started at 16 during a summer while still highschool as a SQL developer for a staffing agency, it was technically an internship according to the company handbook but I had real deadlines and the code I wrote ran in production until the owner retired and shut the company down about 1 year ago. That experience lead me to advise anyone that asks me how to learn to code to start with SQL. It's easier to go Excel -> SQL -> OOP than Excel -> OOP -> SQL. SQL is such a small language, great docs and a much smaller envelope of operational freedom that a general purpose language. Also teaching SQL first provides more career path options earlier in their careers, mainly because they could screw the OOP and pursue positions as a DBA, which made me feel better about firing or laying off people. Most enterprise projects involve databases anyway.