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yShrike | 14 years ago

You'd recommend to an 11 year old to read a book "learning to code the hard way"? Really?

I think you're making a lot of assumptions with a comment like "stop trying to live vicariously through him". Would you have had the same reaction if the question was about sports?

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gharbad|14 years ago

It's a series where you dictate written programs and then debug them. http://learncodethehardway.org/

If the question were about sports, then yes, it would be similar. (eg: football) If your child is passionate about football, begs to watch games etc; consider enrolling him in a football league where he will play football and buy him a book that explains real plays that wont talk down to him because he is a child. If you love football and want to see your child play football, but he has expressed no interest in it, it may not be A Really Good Idea(tm).

(EDIT: added link)

yShrike|14 years ago

For an 11 year old, a more visual pseudo programming language (see Scratch or Alice) is more appropriate than jumping into something like PHP or C. Even Codea is a jump... but Lua is pretty friendly for someone seeing code for the first time.

My kids aren't passionate about sports but they play soccer. The question that I could have asked is 'what's the best league in my area to be in?'. I wouldn't expect that readers would jump to the conclusion that we were living vicariously through them.

At any rate, I thought it was a reasonable initial question. We don't push kids into programming, but we do make materials available when they show interest. That's why I'm familiar with what I posted. However a comment such as "stop trying to live vicariously through him" comes across as rather snide.