Boredom is the mother of curiosity. Take away the dopamine factories and let your kid be bored enough to be interested in learning things.

Ironically, to many kids YouTube is the primary source and inspiration for learning.

I have a kid, and it's an ongoing challenge to limit the screentime. But I'm also impressed by the creative projects and the rapid skill development that sometimes is the result of being glued to the iPad.

That's pretty hard to do imo, specially when other kids in school have all kinds of devices and are hooked to youtube 24/7.

Kids in school don't have time to affect others 24/7, maybe an hour tops if they aren't in sports.

And that's the key, pry the device out of their hand and send them outside.

Good luck actually doing it, though.

Indeed. Youtube is in short supply at our house, and not only as a result of the advertising, surveillance, and addiction factors.

Our generation had distractions, too. TV, for example. I don't know the direct answer to your question but at least part of it is that 'not-forcing' your kid in to programming means they might just never be in to programming. My oldest is at least kind of in to programming (and also plays a lot of Minecraft and watches a lot of YouTube) my youngest two have shown zero interest in programing, but have interests of their own.

Growing up, what my late father probably wanted most from me is for me to find a project of my own. When I was in high school, he once threatened me with "get a life, or I will get you one". Engines, and especially motorcycles, were always a passion of his. He grew up on a farm, and "was rebuilding tractor engines when the other kids were learning to ride bicycles." He still holds a few land speed records he set with motorcycles he designed and built.

But I had no real hobbies or passions of my own, other than playing card games.

It wasn't until my twenties, after I already graduated college with degrees I wasn't interested in and my dad's health failed, that I first tried programming. A decade earlier, my dad was attending the local Linux meetings when away from his machine shop.

Programming, and especially performance optimization/loop vectorization are now my passion and consume most of my free time (https://github.com/JuliaSIMD/LoopVectorization.jl).

Hearing all the stories about people starting and getting hooked when they were 11 makes me feel like I lost a dozen years of my life. I had every opportunity, but just didn't take them. If I had children, I would worry for them.

> Hearing all the stories about people starting and getting hooked when they were 11 makes me feel like I lost a dozen years of my life.

To be totally honest, most of us who start programming when we are <some small age> don't really get that large of a head start.

I'd probably count all of my programming experience from ages 10-20 before I switched from math to CS as "no more valuable than 1-2 years of dedicated undergraduate experience".

The biggest value of early programming experience is learning if you enjoy it well enough to not hate a career at it.

I got my start around 11 but kinda squandered it. Spent most of my time reading about random obscure languages/technologies/frameworks I wouldn’t understand until years later (though it’s great because I can hold a conversation on a topic for a little bit while being completely incompetent) and swearing I was going to make games until I realized I couldn’t do asset design worth shit. To this day I don’t think I’ve ever made (graphical) game.

I was around 14 when I first heard about Haskell, I didn’t know anything about it, functional programming, type theory, lambda calculus or anything related. I just knew it was a programming language. Nowadays I see people around that age programming relatively fluently with it.

All the actual programming I ever did as a kid was make terrible websites, console apps that did nothing useful in particular and a few desktop app shells that did the same. I was probably around 17 before I did anything “serious” and even at that point it wasn’t great.

Now I’m not very old, so I’m not sure if it was simply the environment I was in, but I didn’t know that many other people that were into programming when I was a teenager, even with the internet and all I was normally the youngest guy in every chat/forum/site/group I was on. Nowadays though, I know several teenagers that could code circles around me.

You left out… whether you had fun? Because it sounds like you feel your teenage hobby should have been a productive and focused use of your time leading to some kind of useful product. Which seems like a pretty high bar to set, and, like, besides the point?

You'd worry like your dad, and in the end your kid would still find its way like you did :)

Also, there's no use in regrets. Only lessons learned.

Imo TV is so much worse than the kind of entertainment the person you're replying to listed.

The cable TV I watched as a kid was just garbage. I know it's still all ad driven, but the stuff kids watch now seems much more useful. Roblox is programming.

Half the junior programmers I worked with during the last 10 years got into programming because of Minecraft with no other motivation at all until much later.

That's great! Minecraft was never "my" game but I was always happy that this kinda lego game was the most successful game last decade, because it's so creative. Just shows that gamers (or young people or whatever) aren't just looking for dopamine rushes.

I wonder how many of them also use GitHub and VSCode :)

You can program Roblox... and Minecraft pretty much _is_ a programming UI.

I've never played either but have seen some videos of it. How much of it is just gaming and how much of it is programming? Is programming required to play the games? How often do the players engage in programming part of it as opposed to the gaming part of it?

You mostly play the vanilla game of Minecraft without programming. The survival loop is to mine resources in order to craft better tools that allow you to explore, build, and defeat enemies.

You can get a lot of mileage out of it this way and never touch the programming side. It is an all time bestseller for good reason.

There is an in game material called redstone that is used for simple electrical engineering and circuitry. The devices can play music, push blocks around, open doors, fire arrows, run train cars, and other applications.

The programming starts with command blocks, which can use redstone triggers to execute keyword commands.

There are a bunch of mods that can add automation through programming. For instance, programming a mining robot to drill out a tunnel, using Lua.

Mod programming itself would often be in Java, and add new game entities or systems. This can get fairly advanced and there are some total conversion mods (eg some Pokemon clones).

There are other fun games that are more like programming, like those from Zachtronics. So why Minecraft? It's fun and familiar, and provides a massive canvas for creativity that fires the imagination.

Zachtronics "actually programming"[0] games: TIS-100 Shenzhen I/O

Zachtronics programming[1] games: Spacechem Molek-Syntez Opus Magnum Infinifactory

And probably the rest of them (but for the rest of them, I cannot speak from direct experience)

[0] As in "part of the game is writing assembler code" [1] As in "you are configuring state machines"

you can make games for roblox, uses lua as an embedded scripting language, I think it is also available for minecraft.