BERKELEY, California --Net-happy pre-teens have popularized the language of emoticons and acronyms. But at one middle school in California, kids are learning more advanced languages, like Perl, Java, ...

I was 5 or 6 when I got my first sense of the joys of computer programming. This was in the early 1980s, when few people had a computer. One day, my dad brought home a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the ...