It means to type basic programs found in a book or magazine. It meant learning a poke command to change your background color. Writing a for loop to print out a number.

At 6 maybe you type that huge program that creates a sprite ball that bounces across the screen. By 7 you are drawing out sprites on grid paper and making that bouncing ball different pictures.

It took me until later in highschool to understand things but typing and modifying is programming. My variables for loops were always lili,lolo,lala,lulu,p naming them there purpose seemed foreign.

I think "seriousness" has to be interpreted in the context of the programmer. I discovered computer programming at the ago of seven, and I was about as serious about it as a seven year old can be.

I was 7 when I started writing simple programs (to solve simple equations which came up in maths class) in QBasic. I was 8 when I learned about arrays, which led to writing a contacts app (storing name, address, and phone number in a file, then reading it and displaying the info). It took crazy amounts of time and incredible number of trial and error, but it was fun.

Not sure if I'd be able to pull off the same at 5, but it doesn't strike me as utterly impossible. Also, the GP didn't say what was the result of his "serious coding" - could be nothing (working) at all until much later.

That's why I put it in quotes. Compared to the stuff I would do later, it was utterly trivial, but yes, I was writing what one might consider real programs, with multiple statements, branching, loops, and conditionals, at 5. It's not intended to be self-congratulatory at all -- honest. Only to give you a picture of what's going through a kid's head at that age.

For myself, it was around that age that I stopped just writing games line by line from magazines, and started creating my own from scratch.

I also branched out from just making games, and started writing programs to solve things for me, for example, a budgeting program.