There's a difference between forcing them to write code, and making the learning...

There's a difference between forcing them to write code, and making the learning materials they need to write code readily available.

It's very possible that I may not be a programmer today if my best friend's dad hadn't pulled out an old Apple ][gs and had us hack away at it for an afternoon.

We found a demo floppy that had a BASIC programming tutorial on it, and from there I got hooked.