I came a bit later than this guy, in the mid-80s (I'm 40 this year) and heavily support the idea of teaching at least basic level programming to just about everyone.
I never had a particularly good role-model in school or at home for this, my programming came out of some innate curiosity about computers and robots originally sparked by my love of Sci-Fi.
When I was about 10 I was lucky enough to get my hands on a C64 which was a very big purchase for my single-mom (of 3) to make.
My progression was roughly:
C64: MS BASIC 2.0, 6510 assembly, mostly to implement my own games
Amiga 500: 68k, AREXX, AMOS Basic, C/C++ (pirated copy of SAS/C at first -- sorry, SAS, my allowance wasn't nearly large enough, followed later by Matt Dillon's DICE)
Was an avid BBSer (starting on a 300 baud modem) on the C64 and around the time I got the Amiga I started spending more time on packet-switched networks, some random X.25s and the pre-commercial Internet. Made myself an account on some of the ai.mit.edu machines controlled by gnu (they had open guest accounts and intentionally lax security, rms had a setuid root shell in his home dir, IIRC). From there various UNIX systems (Solaris/BSD/HPUX/NeXT/AIX), more C, C++, emacs lisp, various shell scripting dialects, Perl.
We did have a Pascal course in high school but by then I was pretty far beyond the teacher (who wasn't particularly hacker-ish) on the programming scale.
Later moved to x86 PCs dual booting Windows and Linux which is pretty much still my preferred setup, though now the Linux installs are a multitude of VMs instead of dual-boot partitions. Spent quite a few years doing Win32 application programming in C/C++, lots of backend web development in many different languages and then ARM-based linux embedded devices (@chumby industries). Day job now is Java programming for Android devices, at night I prefer to code in Go (my current primary side-project which is almost all Go [since I'm the only developer and can unilaterally make such decisions] is volunteer work at a Nano Engineering Lab at UCSD writing controller code and scientist-friendly GUIs for TI DMDs, NI motion control devices, Lumenera cameras, various UV lamps and such).
For me the important spark was that my mother was forward-thinking enough to see the C64 as a useful educational purchase for a son with an innate desire to learn about computers. These days it seems like the vast majority of US families have access to computers which is awesome, but there is a tendency (across the entire socio-economic spread) to view them primarily as facebook/twitter-consumption devices, which is pretty sad (no offense to Facebook or Twitter, but early-me had visions of easy access to computers being a bit more meaningful).
I'd love to see more focus on using computers as tools as opposed to consumption devices in both elementary and high school levels.
"For me the important spark was that my mother was forward-thinking enough to see the C64 as a useful educational purchase"
Same here, but mom and dad got me a BBC Micro. Stayed with Acorn and got an Acorn A310 when I was 18. Wrote a game in ARM assembly and self-published it in 1992. Now my day-job is Java, tying this story nicely with this other front-pager today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5551771
My school actively put me off a computer science education. I was programming colorful games in BBC Basic and 6502 assembly language using keyboard and floppy discs, while my O-Level text book was describing punch cards and tapes. I went off and got a degree in Physics instead.
So while we may be only two data points, we both share the experience of having access to a computer at a young age and being way ahead of the teachers by the time it was taught in school. I'm trying to figure out how to make her laptop as easily programmable for my youngest daughter as my BBC was for me. Hell, if I wanted to play a game on the BBC I had to type a command, so right there the reward required the first step of programming.
I never had a particularly good role-model in school or at home for this, my programming came out of some innate curiosity about computers and robots originally sparked by my love of Sci-Fi.
When I was about 10 I was lucky enough to get my hands on a C64 which was a very big purchase for my single-mom (of 3) to make.
My progression was roughly:
C64: MS BASIC 2.0, 6510 assembly, mostly to implement my own games
Amiga 500: 68k, AREXX, AMOS Basic, C/C++ (pirated copy of SAS/C at first -- sorry, SAS, my allowance wasn't nearly large enough, followed later by Matt Dillon's DICE)
Was an avid BBSer (starting on a 300 baud modem) on the C64 and around the time I got the Amiga I started spending more time on packet-switched networks, some random X.25s and the pre-commercial Internet. Made myself an account on some of the ai.mit.edu machines controlled by gnu (they had open guest accounts and intentionally lax security, rms had a setuid root shell in his home dir, IIRC). From there various UNIX systems (Solaris/BSD/HPUX/NeXT/AIX), more C, C++, emacs lisp, various shell scripting dialects, Perl.
We did have a Pascal course in high school but by then I was pretty far beyond the teacher (who wasn't particularly hacker-ish) on the programming scale.
Later moved to x86 PCs dual booting Windows and Linux which is pretty much still my preferred setup, though now the Linux installs are a multitude of VMs instead of dual-boot partitions. Spent quite a few years doing Win32 application programming in C/C++, lots of backend web development in many different languages and then ARM-based linux embedded devices (@chumby industries). Day job now is Java programming for Android devices, at night I prefer to code in Go (my current primary side-project which is almost all Go [since I'm the only developer and can unilaterally make such decisions] is volunteer work at a Nano Engineering Lab at UCSD writing controller code and scientist-friendly GUIs for TI DMDs, NI motion control devices, Lumenera cameras, various UV lamps and such).
For me the important spark was that my mother was forward-thinking enough to see the C64 as a useful educational purchase for a son with an innate desire to learn about computers. These days it seems like the vast majority of US families have access to computers which is awesome, but there is a tendency (across the entire socio-economic spread) to view them primarily as facebook/twitter-consumption devices, which is pretty sad (no offense to Facebook or Twitter, but early-me had visions of easy access to computers being a bit more meaningful).
I'd love to see more focus on using computers as tools as opposed to consumption devices in both elementary and high school levels.