My dad got me started programming when I was 12. He gave me the “introduction to c# copyright 2002” (dm me for the isbn if you want, I’ll have to find it later). I might have done 10% of the book before I kind of got bored and started doing whatever the fuck I wanted. By age 16 I got my first job, and then in college I always had some sort of contract… nowadays I’m working full-time.

All I have is that anecdote to say no… I really hope other people have had better experiences than me.

But if my anecdote helps then you could have potentially three to four years of teaching them how to problem solve as a skill before you teach them how to program. I’m grateful for the problem-solving skills my dad gave me.

I’m also really grateful that my elementary School taught us how to type properly

As soon as they can read a little, they can program. Visual languages or text even. They need a very user friendly env but kids pick up QUICK

I was coding Lua at 13, when I learned I def felt like I could have learned earlier. I was surprised the basic concept was so easy.

I was coding around 8 in logo & dos qbasic, then later on Lego mindstorms.

Children learn FAST. If they are not blind memorizing then logic will just click.

They won’t become “employable professionals” at 10 but they will call pointers intuitive at 13.

I’ve did some very light programming on our C64 at 7 or 8. A few years later it was .bat files to do system stuff. Not exactly C or anything but it was fun, gave me an understanding of programming and the computer. Didn’t end up going the developer road but do scripts in-house and for customers.

My dad first showed me QuickBASIC when I was 6. I didn’t understand the concept of syntax as distinct from semantics at the time but I was still able to learn it.

Just the word syntax? Sure. You teach coding at first by example, not from first principles. At some point, explaining the concepts helps in the teaching but not at first.

I am using this to teach my 4 year old programming and general understanding of how computers process information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDR_paper_computer

We are still working on understanding more complex math concepts, but she understands general addition, multiplication and subtraction. Division has been a little harder.

But, I would say she generally understands how to process “code” written for the computer and write some of her own, really simple applications (with some heavy help from dad).

I’m thinking of sticking with this for a couple years, and then we are going to move to a small LMC that I wrote in C some time ago.

I’ve also thought about using FORTH, but I am probably getting ahead of myself a bit.

If coding is the means to an end they want, they will learn it.

I started learning how to program because I wanted to mod Halo 20y ago. Gaming is often a motivator. I had a co-worker who started in the 80s, whose only option to play games on his C64 was to type up a bunch of BASIC from a magazine. He had to take care not to make any typos, then play the game, and then didn’t have any persistent tape to save it to, so he just lost it all on a reboot. Turns out, if you’re “forced” to type code in all the time, you start to figure out which bits do what, and you start changing it to behave how you want.

“Hacking” could probably work as a motivator, though with great power comes great responsibility.

But yeah, a kid won’t be interested in programming unless they see it as their only option to do what they want to do. PICO8 might be a good entry. Or something like Minecraft modding.

Sure. Almost 40 years ago I started learning to program as a kid, and the only reason I knew the word “syntax” at all was because the default error message in my computer’s BASIC interpreter was “SYNTAX ERROR”. I didn’t learn what it actually meant until many years later, in English class.

I taught myself with the excellent Usborne books, which are now all downloadable for free from their website. You won’t be able to use them as-is (unless you get your kids to use an emulator for an old 8-bit home computer), but I’m sure you can still get some useful ideas, and maybe even copy small sections here and there.

As others have mentioned, my school also taught us a little LOGO, which was a bit of fun for me but rather simple. I remember that most of my classmates enjoyed it, though.

It takes a certain mindset, but yes, definitely, at least for some of them.

Depends what you consider the baseline to call something “coding”

Plenty of kids dabble with Redstone in Minecraft, there is also stuff like this:

I learned coding at age 7-8 by messing around with the scripts of the built-in demo stacks in HyperCard. It was close enough to English that you didn’t need to study syntax but could easily learn from example

Some people I know we’re writing C++ code without AI when they were like 7 years old

Just demonstrate what a syntax error is.

“The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” Vs “The fox, quick, brown, lazy dog is jumped over by.”

You are trying to say the same thing but the computer expects to be told a certain way, so it’s confused.