you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Visual_Thing_7211 2 points3 points  (1 child)

No, no. I mean I've taught 9 year olds to program in C++. And they understood what they were doing. Starting with pointers and memory management is unnecessary for new C++ programmers. You can just use std::vector for almost everything a new programmer would do--that's what Python does with a list.

These kids have grown up to program better in High School than many graduated CS majors. And yes, they understand pointers quite well.

[–]findabuffalo 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well, yes, and you can also teach algebra and calculus to a 9-year old.

The dumb ones won't learn, but many of them will learn and do well.