Your 12 year old son is taking directions from you to debug an IP problem. Your wife wants a new RAID for the server for our wedding anniversary. There are more computers in the house than people (5 people, 3 cats, 9 computers RUNNING, who knows how many as parts...) You are building a new house and worry about the network infrastructure before the room layout. The cost of computer upgrades affects the family budget more than the cost of gas. Your 3 year old can use a mouse (yes, all three kids could at three...) Your 12 year old son is more interested in the OS and file types on the MP3/4 player you are buying him than the music he will listen to. Your 9 year old daughter prefers digital horses to real ones. Your kids are learning Japanese from subtitled Anime and know that they have to wait for BitTorrents to bring the next episode. Your forms of relaxing hobbies are electronics, model trains (electronics) and the stereo (electronics). When you take your children to the Museum of Flight they ask to see the simulation systems reboot to understand the underlying OS and hardware. Your son's favorite shirt is "There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't." You meet your wife in the SF section of a bookstore. I am sure there are more examples, but you get the idea.

I have an 8 and 11 year old starting on Scratch. It is very simple and offers immediate feedback. I will be taking the older one to C++ after that. http://scratch.mit.edu/[^] This is the site at MIT where the Scratch community keeps its code. Some nice stuff there for kids. My 8 year old has a kitten chase a dog, my 11 year old copied it and had a dragon fly in and flame them both. Good luck, the language does not matter as much as the motivation.

Warped would be nice... I remember the good old days of z-80, TRS-80, and 6502 assembler. Flat addressing, only 64K to deal with and you could ignore DOS, no one could afford floppy drives! Just load up your cassette and listen for the start of the program... Now the wimps want GUIs and MICE and all this other namby pamby stuff. No wonder it is all so bloated and slow. I wonder how Wordstar would run ported to a text only 2 Ghz proc?

SCRATCH! I have both an 11 and 8 year old "playing" with it. Great language to start with, 100% graphical. scratch.mit.edu is the address for all of the stuff you need. I would never write a professional project in it, but for learning it is the greatest thing since I taught with Logo in the 80's :-D