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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

As a counterpoint, I started programming on my own at 7 with no guidance. Mainly because my IBM PC booted into a BASIC window if you didn't put the DOS disk in. I asked my mom to get my some magazines from the library so I could copy the games in them.

So it's not totally odd for a 7 year old (or I was odd, which is quite possible).

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>If he has showed you he's interested in programming then go ahead,

>As a counterpoint, I started programming on my own at 7 with no guidance.

To nitpick, that's not really a counterpoint. Parent comment already allowed for the possibility that OP's 7yr old is independently interested in programming. If a child develops that interest of their own volition, with no pressure or leading from the parents, then by all means support and cultivate it. It's only a problem when the parents try to force the child in that direction before the child has developed their own interest first.

The 7 yo's interest here were the games though, not so much the programming, right?

PC games have been the gateway drug for a huge number of programmers.

I think it works in at least a few ways:

1. You discover the amazing power and value of computers, they're not just boring work devices.

2. You learn that other people made the games by writing code, and that anyone can do it if they want to.

3. You end up making your own games and/or get bored of games and want to see what else the computer can do that is also intersting.

> want to see what else the computer can do that is also intersting (sic).

God, so much this!

I also started about that age. At least in the 70’s I think it was a normal age to expose kids to computers if the family was so inclined, and back then Programming was the only thing you could do with such a gadget so that’s what we did.

Ok, I was also competing with my brother who was 10, but still: didn’t feel unusual at all.

Yeah. I did the same thing. I started hacking on the TRS-80 when I was 6 and IBM PC BASIC a couple of years later. Mainly because it was “just there” when you turned the computer on.

When my kid was 6 he had no attention span or desire to learn so I didn’t push it. Now he’s 9 and is asking questions.

I found that the best way to engage him is the old DOS game ZZT. It has a simple but complete OO language. And since you’re programming sprites, the notion of what an object is makes sense.

I taught myself OO with ZZT and I’m hopeful that it’ll click with him too.

Plus, it runs on the beat up laptop I let him use.

Same for me... 2nd grade, a colleague of my dad saw I liked playing on the computer and gave me some old BASIC programming books. I distinctly remember reading about PRINT and running to my mom and dad to tell them I could make the computer output something.

This was in 1991 or so, and the books were from 1978..... I had no idea even where to TYPE the stuff I was learning into. My dad’s friend came over and gave me Qbasic. 30 years later, I still love to code.

> I started programming on my own at 7... Mainly because my IBM PC booted into a BASIC window if

Same here!

Getting started in programming seems so much more daunting these days.

I started coding when I was 12, which itself was strange. I attended a top 10 engineering program and around half of the cs students came in with 0 programming experience. There's no rush. Let kids be kids, if they want to code great, just don't force it. And don't be upset when they burn out after 1.5 hours of extra work a day.

I started programming when I was 19, because that's when I got a computer (more projection) but in any case hard to not project onto your own kids. I think.

That's not a counterpoint, that's just reinforcing their point. It's a good idea to open up a child to as many early experiences as possible, but don't project your interests on them. They'll find out what they like on their own.

They like fortnite!

My wife wishes my son wasn't so into gaming. I'm like, just push him to do gaming more, force him to game, then he will get into watercoloring.

Can you expand some on copying games from magazines?

During the previous century of human civilization, computer games were primitive enough that their entire codebase would fit into a few pages of a magazine. You could play the game by manually retyping the codebase into a text editor.

This is how I learnt loads of great magazines in the 80's in the UK with code in, you spent hours typing it in. It didn't work and you fixed it (that's how I learnt to debug!). The next week the corrections were usually published, good times.

Exactly the same for me, I reckon a lot of 80s kids in the UK who had the right amount of attention span to do it were the same. I remember trying to input the massive list of hex for Tim Follin's 3 channel sound routine that I somehow managed to mistype a part of AND mistype the checksum so that it validated! Cue instant crash every time and disassembling was beyond me at that point.

In the 90s I got an Amiga and discovered the demoscene (basically showing off as mentioned in another comment).

Fast forward another decade and bored at my parents after finishing Uni I dragged my Speccy out of storage and managed to get the Tim Follin music routine running! And found an assembler and did some Z80 assembler demo effects for the lulz.

As you said: good times.

This was later, but I learned a lot from Game Developer magazine. The entire archive is available for free.

https://www.gdcvault.com/gdmag

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