I did my first 'hello world' around that age, though arguably, I did my first real low-level input system at age 9, so it was a slow crawl.

Anyone that compiled a serious program at 5 and hasn't somehow landed a shuttle on a moon by now should be ashamed :P

I dont even think I could say "hello" at that age, let alone have any kind of logical thought.

Watching cartoons and dreaming about becoming a robot. Good start to a programming career.

I applaud any 5 years old that has the patience to really learn ANYTHING.... enough youngsters are not able to sit through a full lesson at school even at the age of 16, and the same can be said for younger kids so yeah...

That said, I lament the crazy ideal of todays society that a) if you are not a genious or a model, or, failing that, at least filthy rich somehow, you are a failure, b) if you sleep more than 4 hours, you are wasting your time, and c) if you haven't started your career before you could walk, you will never be successfull in life.

Common, give the 5 year olds time to play and be kids... fine if they want to learn to play the piano, ballet dancing or learning to program, but don't FORCE them to do that (plenty of parents do)...

Much more important to learn BASIC skills like how to walk, how to socialize, how to talk, how to read, and MAYBE simple math.

But I guess that is besides the point, so coming back OT: I think some of the programming games I have seen in the past looked like a good start. Or a visual scripting tool. That way, a kid can learn basic concepts without needing PERMANENT handholding by a more expierienced programmer until it understands the language, which at that age can take some time.

When I was young my father (a chemist) invented and patented some process that saved the company he worked for a ton of money. They gave him an award and two of these:

They had 3KiB of ram/storage (it was both) and could run basic programs. When I was 5 while on a long road trip, knowing my curiosity for anything 'techy' he tossed one over the backseat to me to stop me from pestering my sister. I was instantly fascinated but after 2 days of reading the manual and playing around could not a get a program running. We were staying at a resort and one of the people at the resort happened to be a programmer. To this day I don't remember the details of what he did, something about medical educational software, but he didn't really take me seriously (I was 5 after all) and kept trying to 'dumb things down' despite my insistence otherwise. None-the-less I was able to pry a few bits of information out of him and he walked me through my first 'hello world' program and taught me the basics of variables. The rest they say... was history.

Don't underestimate the younger ones, some (as I imagine many on this forums understand) are just born with a natural predisposition to this sort of logical thinking. As a young kid I never felt I was 'learning' programming, but rather that I already knew it and just had to figure out how to get the computer to listen to me.

I would also contend Gian-Reto, that sitting has no correlation to learning; and that for many little ones it has exactly the opposite effect.

I would very much consider using Swift, emojis as variable names can really help a 5 year old (talking out of experience). Also the language is reaaaally simple, and you have live results. Way better than my first QBASIC trials at around that age. :D

I would also contend Gian-Reto, that sitting has no correlation to learning; and that for many little ones it has exactly the opposite effect.

Guys, I am pretty much aware of that. Yes, I know there are some young ones that have an amazing ability to learn things, and I am pretty much the living proof being able to learn has nothing to do with being able to sit still (no saying I am a good learner or anything, but still got my degree even though I had been kicked out of the classroom at least twice a week when I was younger because I couldn't sit through a full lesson without starting to become a nuisance to the teacher :) )

I might have had to word it differently: I applaud every youngster who has enough patience and steadyness to REALLY learn something. Often kids lose interests in something fast. True, that has little to do with the ability to get through school with good grades...

I didn't have my first computer until I was 9 (a Commodore 128) and immediately started learning BASIC.

What was nice with the C128 rather than the C64 was that its BASIC had graphical commands otherwise very hard to do for a beginner in pure C64 mode such as circle, box, line, sprite etc. On C64's BASIC you'd have had to use pokes and math formulas for circles (way above my head at that age)

I've had tremendous pleasure trying to visualise simple scenes in my head and then trying to create them procedurally with those commands.

Since the C128 was a complete commercial flop and I became aware that I'd have no audience for my programs I increasingly wanted to be able to program in C64 mode and be able to do the same or better stuff (after all games did exist for the 64 so it was possible but I had to figure out how) and at about 12 I became aware of machine code and how professional games were made with it rather than BASIC. As you can imagine it was a steep learning curve after that...