I don't share his enthusiasm about this. Doesn't everyone interested in computers/computing start programming things that are actually useful at roughly that age?
Also, is an early start a guarantee that someone will choose a career in computing?
Also, is an early start a guarantee that someone will choose a career in computing?
My partner is an aspiring film maker, but knows how to parse a CSV in python and do pattern matching, he was looking for funding and needed to pull all of the "x.com" domains out of a giant spreadsheet .. for him, simple, export as CSV and string match the email field.
This simple skill alone, put him miles ahead of the other film makers in his class, the others were using "find" in excel and copy pasting, he was done in 15 minutes, the others took hours.
There's so many examples where account managers, secretaries, business analysts, chemical engineers etc benefit from simple data matching. They're not going to write the next facebook, and are not interested in a "programming" / "computing" career, but data extraction and simple programming is becoming a basic skill like reading and writing, and it's all good I say!
I don't doubt the usefulness of programming to the non-technologist, but Excel proficiency can be even more useful. It's so much more than just a container for CSVs!
A fair percentage of people who start developing software early end up being passed by people who started later. A seemingly large factor of this is kids learning bad habits on their own and not being able to correct them later, or having a much more difficult time correcting them. (I'm not saying that is the case here, just generally.)
Caveat: we're both dealing purely anecdotal evidence and a fair bit of conjecture. We could easily be wrong.
But I've also spent a lot of time correcting bad habits, reading on good habits, and relearning a lot of things I did as a child -- and most of the code I wrote as a child was pretty awful.
Still, it's something that I've heard often and I can understand the logic behind it.
I saved for my first machine when I was 14 by keeping my lunch money and only eating a bag of crisps a day for over a year; this kid doesn't have to do that..
Sure, lots of people do, but it's nice to listen to her talk about it all the same.
There was one part: "Although it sometimes may be hard, or your programs sometimes won't work, once you do get it to work you feel really happy."
I thought that part was nice.
not everyone takes the same path through life.