programming

“N years of experience” requirements are unnecessary gatekeeping. Smart people can pick up anything quickly, and diverse perspectives are valuable.

Demarco and Lister, in their famous Coding War Games experiment, demonstrated just this - the best predictor of quality for programmers, they found, was not years of experience or salary but rather how quiet their office environment was.

If you don't understand it at 2pm, good luck at 2am.

Something I taught my 11 yo today: Some amount of programming consists of copying and pasting lines you've already written, and then changing a few parameters. But the better the language, the less of this you do.

When teaching kids to program, it's good if you're doing something too, instead of standing over them, so they can experiment (which is an important part of programming). But you can't be doing anything uninterruptible. Sorting Lego is perfect.

Don't worry about kids acquiring bad programming habits when they're first learning. The only habit that matters is the habit of programming. Tidiness can come later. Enthusiasm can't.