I don't think that's the point. Kids don't necessarily know what they'll like until they try it, that's sort of the whole point of being a kid.

Most of the parents here will abuse their kids on a weekly basis with coding crap until they “like” it. Kids like to run, jump, play, be with other kids, not code.

Boy, be sure to tell that to kid-me, hacking away in BASICA on an IBM XT in his bedroom. Poor guy must be a masochist.

Kids like different things. I apparently liked to be a smartass.

On the BBC Micro, tape-based games needed to be loaded into memory at 0x0E00. But the floppy disk driver (DFS) took up 0x0E00 to 0x1900, so you couldn't just copy your games from tape to disk.

My dad wrote a simple program in BBC Basic, to load a game from disk at 0x1900 and then relocate it to 0x0E00 and run it. I thought this was ingenious, but kind of slow.

The BBC Micro user guide must have been very good, because I (7) managed to learn enough 6502 assembly language to rewrite the relocator. My version took just a few seconds.

I'm not sure my relationship with my dad has ever quite recovered.

My little brother started programming when he was five. You might want to rethink your sweeping generalizations about "parents here" or kids in general. It's not just rude and obnoxious, it's ignorant and plain wrong.

My son is almost 9, and he is far more accomplished in programming than I was at that age. And I was a precocious self-taught programmer of the TRS-80 era.

I ran around, jumped and played with other kids when I was a child.

I also spent hours programming, and I bloody loved it. My parents don't so anything related to computer science, they had no idea what I was doing.