Do you want your children to be like you? A programmer's perspective

- John Adams

I do soulless and artless crap like programming so my kids maybe don't have to. I'm doing it to acquire "fuck you money" so my kids can come out of the womb saying "fuck you" and then they can go pursue more virtuous, noble, artful things.

When I was a kid in the late 1950s, we had a typical TV of the day, with a dozen or so tubes that would often burn out, so the TV would "go on the fritz".

Dad would pull out all the tubes, put them in a cigar box, take them to the corner grocery and plug them into the tube tester one by one, and buy a replacement for the bad tube. And I would tag along with him.

The next time the TV went on the fritz, I asked him, "Dad, can I pull out the tubes and test them and find the bad one and put the TV back together?" He said "Yes, you can!" So I did.

He was also an avid fisherman and took me and my sister on his fishing trips. I didn't take much interest in that, but he never pushed me into it.

Mom was an accomplished seamstress but didn't have a knack for mechanical things. So when her sewing machine needed oiling or minor adjustments, I found the manual and took care of it for her.

She also had a Smith-Corona Portable Electric Typewriter that came with a touch typing course: a little paper easel with exercises and a set of phonograph records with voice instructions. Given my interest in machinery, I thought this was cool and worked through the entire course, learning to touch type at the age of eight.

Fast forward 40 years.

I will call my late wife Carol, and our two daughters Alice and Becky.

I was working one evening when Alice walked in and asked, "Dad, whatcha doing?" I said "I'm working on some JavaScript code." She asked, "Can I do that?"

My eyes lit up and I said "Yes! You can!"

I grabbed another laptop and set her up next to me and showed her how to write a simple loop and an if statement.

The next evening, Becky asked, "Dad, what was Alice doing last night?" "She was learning to write JavaScript code." "Can I do that?" You can guess my answer.

Over the course of a few days, they started competing with each other! "Dad, am I ahead of Alice?" and "Am I ahead of Becky?"

Around 11 a few nights later, my late wife Carol walked in and said, "Why is Alice up so late?!" I explained that she and Becky had taken a sudden interest in programming and I was tutoring them.

She would have none of it. "They have school at 8 in the morning and we have a curriculum to follow. They can't stay up late doing this!"

We were homeschooling at the time, which I thought was a great idea because it would allow our daughters to find things that interested them and pursue them. But Carol only wanted them to follow a strict schedule with a standardized curriculum that she had bought, even if it bored them to tears and kept them from finding their real interests.

I can't really blame her. She did what she knew how to do. I can only blame myself for not pushing back and insisting that it would be great if our daughters could have an opportunity to dig into something that interested them.

An opportunity like I had when I was young.

Both the girls dropped out of our little programming course after that and never took an interest in it again.

I don't know what could have happened if they had been allowed to pursue this interest.

Any insight on how this part happened? As a total layman, architecture strikes me as only 10% or so art in the painting sense of art. It could be more if you also consider e.g. software design to be an art, but at that point most things are art.