Kids can build games pretty easily now with Scratch. I’ve several friends whose kids are doing this at that age and a couple are writing scratch in school. It’s pretty easy these days.

When I was as 8, I definitely wanted to learn to code.

Five years after that I was on equal footing with a few adult software engineers around me (my parents and their friends).

Playing/hacking/working with professional-grade code (leaked Quake code in particular) really helped me to form a good style. Wish I’ve received more code review hours even on kiddies projects.

Funnily enough some of the code I’ve written at 8-9 (a menu system for a primitive graphics editor) I’ve reused five years later in a project that had users and significant money returns.