Should the Kid Learn to Program? If So, What?

As a 40 year professional programmer in North America, I believe there are still plenty of opportunities in IT but the skill levels and pay vary widely. At the risk of a bad analogy, I suspect being interested in programming is like being interested in the military...what aspect and to what degree and what are you willing to endure to achieve success? If not that, maybe medicine. To keep this reply short I would say that learning programming is like taking a drink from a fire hose. There is sooooo much to learn and soooo much free information and sooooo much sample code out there. In the beginning you have to pay your dues and learn enough to be able to create working programs that reliably accomplish specific tasks and which are readable by other programmers and can be changed by you or others as new requirements arise. Even if you can do that you are just a one trick pony. Then there are all the programming standards and paradigms and tools. Object Oriented Programming and Design, Model View Controller, Relational Databases, source versioning control, User Interfaces and Experience, automated and manual unit testing, multi-phase commit. And personally I wish I knew more numerical analysis, statistics and accounting. With regard to languages I will defer to others. However you should know that COBOL, which shows up on nobody's "popular" list, is still in demand because of the enormous number of programs that have been written in it. We just hired and trained 12 people at our company in COBOL. Also note that relational databases have a powerful dedicated language: SQL. We haven't even talked about operating systems. I work in mainframe, Windows and Linux currently. And then there's mobile platforms. You asked "in a reasonable amount of time". So that is the kicker. It certainly is possible to do part time work and perhaps full time work as a programmer after learning the basics, but there is a Catch-22 like in most professions...nobody wants to deal with the inexperienced if they can help it. I will also defer to others on that point also. I think to some extent you need to get "hooked" and get a thrill from learning and creating programs and solving problems, or just using and extending existing systems in new ways. Also a motivational tip: programming tasks find their level, like water. Easy tasks sink to the bottom and are assigned to programmers who can only do easy tasks. So don't be that person for goodness sake! Strive hard to be able to do challenging and complex work.

on the "what language" front, if this is intended to find a job then it makes sense to look at the jobs available locally - learn whatever is popular where you are. also, when learning, community support is useful. so whatever language you choose, try to find a supportive community of peers. so putting those together, find maybe the top two languages in local job offers, then see what resources and support are available for both, and go for the better supported of the two.