what better place to ask this question than HN? If you could do it all over again, how would you it? Imagine yourself in your early teen years, fully capable of self-teaching and already with a solid foundation of maths and sciences, yet you never really got into much computers technology (have not done any programming). But now you want to get into it, you have the time and want to make it a learning experience with the future in mind, rather than an immediate goal of being able to program on a language or two ASAP. At the same time you'd want it to have it moderately exciting, practical, that you can start using somehow computers in projects that a child is more interested, like robotics rather than pure software. How would you do it? What resources you'd use? Would you start with a functional language when you'll start applying the concepts you learn or not? This is not a hypothetical question, somebody needs your advise.