We should teach all our kids to code

It's still the truth these days. Of course, we don't have basic installed by default anymore. Instead, I have a desire to make video games and it took me several tries over my childhood until I started to program seriously at age 15.

I agree, but that kind of programming is very different from the type of programming that will be useful to non programmer kids when they grow up. There is also google, stack overflow and a waltz of easily accessible information on how to do X in language Y that was not online then.

I am drawing a distinction between coding and programming. Let me explain - When I graduated from college in 1999 the career office was very assertive that I should use and describe my ability with the MS Office productivity suite. When and how it had become an important enough to include on my resume doesn't matter, it was an important skill to have for the types of jobs I was going to be applying for. So programming and programmers will always have to dive deep and be able to develop complex systems. I am using the word coding in the same context as what I started with: I worked in a laboratory and collected lots of scientific data. I learned how to automate the tedious parts of manipulating, formatting and emailing out the results to save my time and reduce the errors I made doing it manually. To me, this was a self taught journey to learning to code with vba and even back in the first half of the Aughts there were decent places to figure things our for VBA.

I think in the future, kids or prospective employees in general that are not programmers, being able to put "can write JavaScript and VBA to automate repetitive tasks" will not be required. But, the candidates who can will have a marketable skill that sets them apart from their peers even though they are both trying to get a job in Supply Chain or Regulatory Affairs.

And these days, JavaScript is very easy to get started with, fire up a modern browser, open up the console and type in your program on any web page. It's been a while since I worked with VBA but I assume it is discussed on stack overflow.

Indeed it has many problems. The first problem is that the Mathematics-Informatics profile in high school is considered elite, and every parent sends its children there. The effect is that the class will have the best, most intelligent students, but not necessarily the students interested in the curriculum. Neither the children or the parents know anything about the curriculum, all they know is that all the smart kids go there.

I've been in this class in one of the top-5 colleges, nation-wide. Some poll in the final year yielded 80% of the students hating both math and programming. Most preferred literature. Because of the inherent bias in Romanian education, the highest graded students will always be the ones who like liberal arts, and not the ones with a mathematical background and because of the way enlistment to high school works, these will be the ones that end in this class.

I mentioned I was in one of the top 5 classes nationwide to illustrate the second problem. Even though I was in one of the best classes, professors that taught programming were execrable, both in their talent as educators and in their talent as programmers. Incompetent is a word that's too mild to describe them. Reasons are easy to guess, high school teachers are paid poorly and anyone with any talent in CompSci will find a better job elsewhere. It's funny that the only two skilled professors that taught programming were two guys that did something completely different and only taught at high school because they enjoyed teaching and working with young students.

The third problem is that the curriculum is very abstract, way too abstract and far from reality, and very old, nothing feels like today, students are still required to write DOS applications with a DOS editor.

It's very possible that I may not be a programmer today if my best friend's dad hadn't pulled out an old Apple ][gs and had us hack away at it for an afternoon.

We found a demo floppy that had a BASIC programming tutorial on it, and from there I got hooked.