Evidence is that every single programmer that exists in the world, and that started coding as a kid, had to and grasped a concept of a real programming language or they wouldn't be a programmer.
I personally started coding at 8 with BASIC, using a book in another language (that I didn't speak) as a guide. This is the kind of thing a future programmer would do.
I tried teaching programming to my daughter when she was 8. We started with Python and it didn't go. I thought maybe we should try Scratch like everyone is telling us to do. It didn't go either because she was simply not interested in learning programming.
> So a case study on a sample of 2 - does it count?
no :)
What would you have done if she was not interested in learning math or literacy?
Also when you were 8, you didnt have about 1 million developers making 500k per year trying to extract(and sell) every single bit of your attention in any possible way. From roblox to netflix to tiktok to supercell.
It took us like 300 years to learn how to teach math, and we are still improving, we are getting new tools every day, just look at https://www.youtube.com/3blue1brown can you imagine how many people he himself has reached and inspired? People that previously thought: "math is not for me".