[fabricode]

I cannot believe you missed the most important reason: you shared some of your life with your daughter.

My dad was a programmer, and I was always hacking away on the computers that we had around the house (sure... it was an Atari 800.... but you'd be amazed at what you can do on that little thing). Unfortunately, he never worked with me on any of my code ever. He never taught me anything about design, about computer languages, --nothing--. Perhaps I could have been more aggressive about getting him to help me, but I was an introvert's introvert. I was the kid in school who blushed when his name was called during attendance.

Looking back, I can't believe the wasted opportunity. You should enjoy this activity with your daughter for what it is. Forget the other 1,000 paragraphs you wrote about why.

I'm glad that you did this, and your daughter will be too.

( I read your article twice to make sure I didn't miss it, but I sometimes skip a sentence, so please pardon me if I got this wrong. )

[jongalloway2]

I did say "We had fun." :-)

But, yes, that was by far the best part. And we had something to talk about later. You're right.

[bad_user]

My son is almost 2 years old and I'm dreaming about all the things we'll be able to do together.

My dad was also too busy to do stuff with me while I grew up. He worked hard for a living, so I don't blame him. Life is hard and somebody needs to put money on the table.

Don't be too harsh on your dad. He may have been too tired or fed up with what he did to have energy left to teach you about programming.

And on the "waisted opportunity" I don't necessarily agree. You probably became a programmer because he was one, and because you had computers around. You started hacking stuff because it was fun, but if you had a father that was a bad teacher and that pushed you in areas you didn't like, then your passion could have faded away, because passion is a fragile thing.

[drbawb]

Agreed. My father didn't help as directly as he could've. But he worked hard, provided a good life, and because of his job all the materials I needed were either readily available or easily borrowed.

Honestly the greatest thing my dad ever did was give me his work phone-number (before e-mail was considered strictly a necessity.) Granted you can't answer for your kid all the time - but demonstrating your willingness to be available goes a long way in the mind of a child.

[freehunter]

Although I recognize that this topic is specifically about girls, this is important with kids in general and not just daughters. My uncle is a programmer with more than a few lines running in Red Hat and various other large projects. He works for a large company writing code in C, assembly, Python, whatever is needed. He is a programmer, and that is his life.

He also has a teenage son, who cannot write a single line of code despite the obvious will to learn.

I've tried teaching the boy over Skype. I've written tutorials, done my best to help him. Although I am not a programmer, I was willing to learn with him. But as much as he wanted to learn, he didn't want to learn it from me or from O'Reilly or from anyone else. If even his professional programmer of a father won't give him a few minutes of his life a couple times a week, how can anyone else hope to drive the boy's ambition?

A kid shouldn't be expected to keep pressure on their parents to help them learn, that should be an intrinsic value distilled in all parents. Your story has you sounding like an adult version of my cousin, looking back on a missed moment. That kind of makes me sad. Don't waste time with your kids. Opportunities like that don't stay around forever.

[drbawb]

My dad is also a programmer. He helped me out as best he could; but for the most part we lived in two separate worlds.

Sure some stuff was common: if I needed a regular expression, he could always help me out. He had an editor (CodeWright?) with great support for that.

But I lived in the web world, and he made his living with embedded devices. Back in the 90s I was hacking away with 384MB of RAM in a Linux server. He was hacking away with, if he was lucky, 8MB of ROM and 4MB of RAM.

Still we talked about programming very little. Now we talk about the hilarious nuances of project management, but our work is still done in two completely separate worlds.