[formercoder]

Fair enough, obviously OP has the right to parent as he pleases. I think that my tinkering intuition has led me to many of my professional successes, and this talent was garnered by experimentation with computers as a child.

[aaomidi]

Eh I sometimes wish parents weren't basically given ownership rights over their kids.

[CarbyAu]

Yeah. Different people have different values.

In the same way people see "free speech" as being a good thing, "free parenting" is similar, both in concept and result.

Clearly, some people talk shit and some people parent shit. And the results are as per expectation.

But without the mixing pot of variation we wouldn't have the better ways either - and we try as a society to have education(for parents and kids, for speech and parenting) make up the difference.

And worse come to worse, there is the unfortunate need for Child Services, however that works out...

[burntoutfire]

They aren't, most developed countries have some form of Child Protection Services for cases of abuse.

[imesh]

No disagreement from me. Without gaming on Windows systems I would may never gotten involved in programming in the first place. I'm currently watching what looked like my nephews Roblox/Minecraft addiction turn into some real amazing content creation utilizing youtube as a very real learning source.

[bitwize]

> Without gaming on Windows systems I would may never gotten involved in programming in the first place.

I'm just the opposite. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20 -- with no games! As far as I was concerned, all it could do was BASIC. It did come with a helpful instruction guide to teach you the rudiments of programming.

I got later systems and games for them later on, but my experience with the VIC-20 put this bias in my head that computers were meant for programming, like pencils were meant for writing with. If it is difficult or impossible to program a digital device, I have trouble considering it a computer at all (even though it technically may be).

[mixmastamyk]

Me too. Here's a blast from the past I recently came across:

https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20...

Personally I had the most fun with the sentence generator, but I did find a game somewhere. Something like Missile Command. Had to type it in from a magazine I believe. It never worked quite right however. Had a few obvious bugs which I corrected, and a few I wasn't able to.

The manual is amazing from today's perspective. On the first few pages it has cartoons and teaches you how to use the shift key and such rudimentary things. A dozen pages later you are learning how to PEEK and POKE memory locations. It assumed you were intelligent. I miss that.

Recently I've read there was assembly language book and modem addon, that I never knew existed, a shame really.

I think I'll submit it.

[mixmastamyk]

Kid has Linux, every programming lang available, Minecraft, ebooks, wikipedia, educational websites, etc. We live a block from the library. No shortage of quality learning materials basically. Perhaps ya'll've misread the list.

It's a preference for quality over quantity.

[imesh]

Everybody has their parenting preferences based on their experiences. I believe educated parents making an effort have favorable results. I can't imagine anyone with your lists of rules not raising intellectually stimulated and curious individuals either.

[bradlys]

> Kid has Linux, every programming lang available, Minecraft, ebooks, wikipedia, educational websites, etc. We live a block from the library. No shortage of quality learning materials basically. Perhaps ya'll've misread the list.

Yes - because every kid wants to program purely for the fun of it. There's never an end goal in mind - they just learn functional programming for the fun of it! They all enjoy finding ways to chain esoteric commands together in a terminal.

[mixmastamyk]

What's your point? The programming languages reference was due to comments above that tech folks wouldn't have become who they are without the ability to program.

[bitwize]

There's a place for kids who aren't into that shit.

It's called "Outside".