[mechanical_fish]

I don't farm or paint on a professional basis. I don't even do so as a hobby; although I constantly threaten to take up gardening, it seems to be one of those hobbies that hasn't stuck yet.

And yet I'm glad that, when I was a kid, people encouraged me to plant things and paint things.

Just because learning to code is societally approved doesn't mean that kids shouldn't be encouraged to practice it for fun. Trust me, if the kids decide they hate it they'll figure out how to avoid it as much as they can in the future. They're good at that.

Mind you, your attitude that you shouldn't expect your kids to take after you is a healthy one, and I don't want to discourage it. But don't take it too far. It's good that people are trying to figure out better ways to teach kids about programming.

[drbawb]

There's a difference between forcing them to write code, and making the learning materials they need to write code readily available.

It's very possible that I may not be a programmer today if my best friend's dad hadn't pulled out an old Apple ][gs and had us hack away at it for an afternoon.

We found a demo floppy that had a BASIC programming tutorial on it, and from there I got hooked.