Comment Re:at 12 I learned HTML (Score 1) 799
HTML hardly constitutes "programming" in any reasonable sense. That's not to disparage knowing it as a skill, but regardless of what some people think, it's not programming.
While of course strictly true, I don't think that for the true beginner "programming" is actually the most important thing.
Learning to write HTML (okay, learning to write standards-compliant, non-lazy HTML) forces one into the mindset of thinking about how a computer is going to interpret something. Don't underestimate the effort involved in parsing a line of code, be it a loop in C or a row of table data in HTML; training one's mind to be able to walk through code of any flavor is a crucial skill to hone early on.
Some of my first efforts to make a computer do what I wanted programatically involved creating simply web pages (this was back in 1993 or so). It was very exciting to see the results of my work, and figuring out why my output didn't look quite right was, in effect, my first exposure to the debugging process. Eventually I wanted one of those newfangled email forms, so I next picked up Perl. (Yeah, please refrain from poking fun at my early language choices.)
So, HTML proved a "gateway drug" into software development. Many years later, I came to learn C, Obj-C, Python, PHP/MySQL, etc. "Programming" can wait - let kids start out with web pages.
(As an aside, I never did learn Java. In retrospect, I wish I had learned Java in lieu of the Perl and PHP I cultivated for server-side web work; while Perl has definite sysadmin uses, Java could have replaced PHP quite satisfactorily and would have been more broadly useful outside web work. Just advice I would give to those starting to program.)