Except now that it's much much harder to make programs that do significant things - rolodex programs already exist, you don't have to write your own like you did and learn how programming works just to scratch an itch, as you did in the old days.

If you did want to build a rolodex program today, you usually have to either learn C++, a framework, and spend waaayyyy too much time starting up - you need to get something up and going fast.

Python may provide the answer - an interactive console where you can try stuff out (and get responses right now), a simple programming language with very little confusing syntax, and you can start going with Python with very little formal structure (you can even do an amazing amount of stuff without functions.)

For the beginning programmer statically typed languages just don't make sense - I want to save something in a variable and I don't care that there's a difference between booleans, ints, longs, strings or anything - I just want to save that value for later.

With a statically typing language, you must care - you can not have variables without saying what kind they are. But why? There's so much other stuff to understand at the beginning, without having to add something extra into the mix.

Educators are beginning to teach foreign languages at an earlier age, and introducing computer programming concepts to younger age children helps shape logical thinking skills, even if they aren't going to be programmers at a later age. (I know my programming experience helped me understand accounting in senior year.)
9:01:55 PM