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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Wait until your son is interested. Very very very few children are interested in programming at age seven. Something that most children enjoy at that age is sitting on a parent's lap while the parent shares what they are doing with the child with a focus on sharing rather than on the thing they are doing.

My observation based on limited anecdotal evidence is that an interest in video games does not correlate to an interest in programming among children (or adults). Video games seem like fun to a lot of people and programming only seems like fun to a very few people.

Good luck.

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My (smart) 8 year old is not interested in daddy's boring programming stuff AFAIK, but has latched onto binary and I make him and his older sister convert chapter numbers between binary, octal, decimal and hexadecimal (and Roman numerals) when I'm reading to them at night.

Don't necessarily force everything on him at once, but fragments might stick.

My dad got me hooked on (ultimately) electronics with one simple circuit maybe age 6 (maybe younger) that broke my expectations of what 'boring' batteries and lights and switches would do.

I actually learned programming by hacking video games. It started with Gameshark, Tsearch, poking and sieving memory. Packet sniffing and editing with WPE Pro. And then learning C and assembly language, the windows PE file format and about packers, Ollydbg, Softice..the whole gamut.

In some ways I echo the parent comment. I naturally wanted to know how my computer functioned and well..my games too. That cant really be forced to a kid..itd just be a chore.

>Wait until your son is interested.

What an obvious realization that I hadn't thought about, lol. I guess I could wait, but I am thinking of pushing him (lol) to developing interests for possible occupations that I know that can be reliably done independently where verbal expression of language is not primarily essential, but not manual labor. I can wait too and see if he bites or drop hints to see whether he develops slow interest.

Between the two of us, you're not the first one to want to push their child toward something at age seven. For me that was about a decade ago. What I know now is that in a decade your child will still be a child and in that intervening decade they will have many interests and pretty much all of them will pass. Of the few of them that stick, maybe one or two will be constant and the rest that stick will come back occasionally for brief periods and then disappear for a few years.

In terms of occupations, who knows what programming will be like in fifteen years? In 2002, most people would not have expected pair programming and two pizza teams or Github's social coding to be mainstream methodologies.

As far I am concerned the core skills for programming (and the fascination) have not changed much in 40+ years, when my mum 'ran' my first ever typed-out Fortran program pretending to be what we'd now call a VM!

Writing a Z80 assembler space-invaders game for an MZ-80K then ... and 10 years of school and then AI+CS honours and then a MSc in theoretical CS and then 20 years of banking and Y2K type nonsense etc etc ... and now I'm writing code for something of about the same power as that Z80 again, though developing with nice compilers and GB of storage on SSDs rather than kB cassette tapes so can get rather more useful loc working.

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