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Comment by rmbyrro | Hacker News Reader

I understand your point.

By saying "teach my kids to code", I don't imply "forcing my kids" into it. Just introducing, letting them experience and know it exists, what it's for, how it works.

If I don't expose them to coding, how could I ever know they're interested or not?

A tangent:

The two generations before mine worried too much about letting children "just play". Life was too tough on them when they were kids. And they went to the opposite extreme: made life too soft for me as a kid.

I grew up with a completely wrong vision of life and the world. I entered youth totally unprepared. It's anectodal and I bet there are people who had a too soft childhood with only play and managed it differently, but I'm going to find a better balance for my kids as they grow.

I want to smoothly and gently introduce pieces of adulthood to them, so that when they reach maturity, they're better prepared to be happier, more confident and independent.

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I agree with most of what you said.

> If I don't expose them to coding, how could I ever know they're interested or not?

About this one; programming nowadays is not some obscure niche thing that it's impossible to come by unless introduced by someone else. I started my programming career (being paid to do) when I was a teenager. There was no-one using computers around me let alone knowing what programming is to introduce it to me. I believe nowadays everyone in a somewhat developed or developing country will have the opportunity to choose whether to learn coding or not.

I think this might be less true than you think. As opposed to the past, computing devices are ubiquitous yet extremely consumption oriented.

There is no obvious way an avid user of an iPhone or iPad might be exposed to anything resembling programming without seeking it out.

The same is more or less true with desktop os

Yep. And that's also true on Android devices (though getting into a programming environment is often easier, or historically was easier, on them than with iOS/iPadOS devices). It's getting easier on iPadOS with Swift Playground (which has been around for a few years now) and other apps, but you still have to know about it and download it.

In the 70s/80s home computers dropped you into a programming environment immediately or a programming-like environment (the shell or command prompt). In the 90s this was less true, but it still wasn't a huge distance from launching to accessing a programming environment (and on Linux and BSDs you still typically started in the shell). In the 00s and 10s, on macOS/Windows/Linux you can still get to a programming environment or shell easily enough (and macOS and Linux generally come with a basic suite of programming tools like compilers and interpreters), but the "distance" for the user has been increasing. If you want even some common tools you have to download them instead of having them immediately available, or in macOS you have to know that there is a terminal which provides better access to the supplied development tools.

Mobile devices have always been behind on this, but they've become an increasingly common first computer for many which skews the relationship that people have with computers away from seeing them as tools to manipulate (via programming and scripts) to appliances. They have more in common with embedded systems like the Tivo or video game consoles than with PCs, providing users with a preset script on how to use them and not the more open-ended model of PCs.

I was talking mostly about the desktop space. My experience is from more or less the current generation of desktop OSes (GUIs as default etc.).

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