When I was a kid, there were no programming classes in school and I had to go buy books and …

> Writing a toy program that fills the screen with "HELLO, I AM COMPUTER" does not feel like you just learned a magical incantation that makes this machine do your bidding Find out what his favourite hobby or favourite game is, then demonstrate a little script... Suddenly the conditional branches and loops don't seem so abstract anymore !

> Writing a toy program that fills the screen with "HELLO, I AM COMPUTER" does not feel like you just learned a magical incantation that makes this machine do your bidding. But there's joy to be found in writing pointless and abstract programs. It's more about the journey and less about the utility of the finished product. Writing, for example, an ASCII-art drawing system that works on a big rectangular 2D character array can teach you so many concepts – from OO and encapsulation, through linear algebra, to file IO.

> Writing a toy program that fills the screen with "HELLO, I AM COMPUTER" does not feel like you just learned a magical incantation that makes this machine do your bidding. No, but in the 80s, when the guy at Radio Shack didn't know how to stop it, it was still worth it somehow. What can your kid do to assert some goofy kind of power in today's adult world?

Isn't there is a similar spread for older technologies and crafts like horticulture/agriculture, textiles, ceramics, metalwork, printing, music, cooking... is this just evidence that software has arrived?

> Writing some actually useful code is harder, and it feels pointless, because there's almost always an existing app you can have at a click of a button and it does what you thought of and probably better. Well, there are a lot of people who enjoy cooking, or gardening, or carpentry, or making their own clothing, or playing in a local softball league, even though there are many professionals with professional-level skills and equipment who can do those jobs better than they can. I think it's like you suggested in your later comment: you either have the bug for programming, or you don't. There are a lot of programmers nowadays who don't -- they just program to make a buck. Not that there's anything wrong with making a buck, but it's like the guy who flips burgers at McDonalds. He does it to make a buck, not because it's speaking to his inner need to be a creative chef.