Ask HN: Advice for 14-year-old who wants to learn to code?

It's probably better to pick something smaller and more achievable at first so you can make some early progress and experience some successes but picking a huge goal is fine too, you just have to break that huge goal down into smaller and smaller ones until you have a reasonably sized sub-goal to break off and work on.

I would suggest heading to the library (whether public or high school's) and taking out a book on Python. There are a lot of online books, but I find that having a physical book you're learning from is a worthwhile experience. There's less distraction, and watching that bookmark move from the beginning to the end of the book is very satisfying. Also, I thnk it's extremely important that you be there to guide him, and foster inquisitiveness, as that's a very key property of some of the greatest computer scientists and hackers.

I will echo Igas's suggestion also -- it would be great if he had something he wanted to build to channel this urge into. Even dinky little programs like text-based calculators feel impressive when you're starting out, and get you a feel for programming quickly.

When he wants to cut his teeth on stuff that is "real world useful" you can show him a framework like Flask (which is wonderfully minimal), and have him make a web server on localhost. That would be a perfect segue into web tech (HTML/JS/CSS). That might also be a good time to introduce a second language, like Ruby (which is similar enough to python) to show how similar languages can be to each other. I would say this sets you up to introduce the most important parts of CS: the data structure & algorithmic underpinnings. This is the stuff that sticks with you for a very long time and is always useful, no matter the language.

This might be wishful/meaningless thinking, but you could also introduce him to SICP classes by abelson and sussman. I say this for a few reasons:

1. Lisp is simple, yet powerful (they show this)

2. The realization that very little about computer science is actually "new" thought

3. Introduction to the plethora of college-level courses available for free, and getting used to being in charge of your own education (but using a more traditional medium)

    var comments = document.querySelectorAll('.comment');

    [].forEach.call(comments, function(comment){comment.style.backgroundColor = "#ffaa44"})