At 6/7 I was typing in BASIC programs for my VIC-20 out of the book which isn't much different to working with a command line. I don't think I was exceptional, there just wasn't much else to do in the 80s.
Around 8 I was copying the example programs from the GW-BASIC manual (especially the ones that involved graphics) on an MS-DOS 3.1 computer, then I was randomly modifying them to see what would happen... not exactly sure how I ended up learning how to program, but at 10 I was able to do simple programs in BASIC.
I think that learning in an environment without a GUI was in the end very helpful. Of course in the beginning it was quite difficult, but very gratifying when I got something right.
At 7 I was typing programs from the book of around 100 basic examples on Atari 800xl and making derivatives. It would help if someone told me back than what a subroutine is.
