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Comment by gharbad | Hacker News Reader

It's a series where you dictate written programs and then debug them. http://learncodethehardway.org/

If the question were about sports, then yes, it would be similar. (eg: football) If your child is passionate about football, begs to watch games etc; consider enrolling him in a football league where he will play football and buy him a book that explains real plays that wont talk down to him because he is a child. If you love football and want to see your child play football, but he has expressed no interest in it, it may not be A Really Good Idea(tm).

(EDIT: added link)

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For an 11 year old, a more visual pseudo programming language (see Scratch or Alice) is more appropriate than jumping into something like PHP or C. Even Codea is a jump... but Lua is pretty friendly for someone seeing code for the first time.

My kids aren't passionate about sports but they play soccer. The question that I could have asked is 'what's the best league in my area to be in?'. I wouldn't expect that readers would jump to the conclusion that we were living vicariously through them.

At any rate, I thought it was a reasonable initial question. We don't push kids into programming, but we do make materials available when they show interest. That's why I'm familiar with what I posted. However a comment such as "stop trying to live vicariously through him" comes across as rather snide.

Disagree on Scratch or Alice being necessarily better. At 11, he can certainly jump into languages like PHP or Python perfectly fine. Many programmers (including many here) started a much younger age than 11 and at a time when Scratch or Alice may not have been available. There's nothing wrong with going straight to those.

Yes, I think that really depends on the kid. Mainly I wanted to point out that there are plenty of learning vehicles that teach the programming concepts without necessarily being 100% text-based coding. For some kids that will excite them more. (That's also why I like WeDo Robotics and Mindstorm.)

Nothing wrong with going directly to programming languages if that's what the kid's into.

Oh and I'm not totally humorless.

http://xkcd.com/386/

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