There’s never been a better time to be a 14-year-old developer

http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/09/theres-never-been-a-better-time-to-be-a-14-year-old-developer/

by jaf12duke • 14 years ago

34 32 14 years ago

kevinh• 14 years ago

The reason it's great to be a young developer is all the press it garners. Even a mediocre game will earn a top spot on HN if it's programmed by a young person.

rxooo• 14 years ago

A lot of people give unwarranted applause to young developers. So it's pretty easy for it to go their heads. I definitely agree that doing something at a younger age doesn't really mean that it's "better".

damian20002• 14 years ago

Some encouragement is a whole lot better than nothing though. For every one of these young app store success stories there's probably 10 who are just as technically gifted, but just enjoy programming for programmings sake.

enjo• 14 years ago

It's endemic at hackathons. If you're a 14-18 year old girl, you owe it to yourself to head to the nearest hackathon with an interesting first place prize. You'll win.

Samuel_Michon• 14 years ago

"[14 yr old Rubin] was recently hired to develop a new website for the American Journal of Psychiatry (in part because it’s edited by his uncle)."

That doesn’t sound like a good idea...

goldenchrome• 14 years ago

No it's a fantastic idea, he's a child prodigy after all. Eagerness and being related to the editor are entirely more important than professional quality anyway.

hdra• 14 years ago

is this still a big deal today? unlike a few years ago, computers are easily accessible today, information and lessons on the internet are waiting to be discovered... I simply don't think age matters at all in this field..

J_Darnley• 14 years ago

I would say that this facet of computers is becoming less accessible as time goes on. App stores, code signing, OS lock-downs and all sorts of "security" measures just make it harder for someone to pick up programming.

chris_p3• 14 years ago

On the other hand, today everybody has access to MOOCs, google, communities like HN, reddit, stackoverflow and organizations like MakeGamesWithUs.

greenyoda2• 14 years ago

That's only true if you want to learn programming on a locked-down platform like an iPad or a smartphone. You can still write code for Windows or Linux that anyone can download from your web site or Github without jumping through any hoops. And despite all the prognostications about the death of the general-purpose computer being imminent, there are still infinitely many useful programs that you can develop for a desktop/laptop machine.

chris_p3• 14 years ago

I totally agree. If anything, 14 year olds have more free time to spend on their hobbies and can learn new things much more easily than adults.

protomyth2• 14 years ago

Actually, for a lot of folks, computers capable of being programmed are less accessible. A whole class of sub-$200 computers disappeared long ago.

greenyoda2• 14 years ago

The inflation-adjusted equivalent of $200 in 1980 (that the original comment was referring to) would be over $500 today, which is enough to buy a new laptop. For $200 you can still pick up a fairly reasonable used machine - or if you're a kid, you might be able to get your parent's old machine for free. Not to mention that today, computers are available for free in many schools.

damian20002• 14 years ago

I disagree with the first paragraph; isn't it more difficult now than it was a couple of years ago to get a successful iOS app store hit? with the huge amount of competition and number of quality free game downloads now.

notintokyo• 14 years ago

If you compare making an iOS app now to making a successful Symbian game a few years ago, it's night and day.

gexla• 14 years ago

Being a good developer is largely about practice. Who has more time to practice than a 14 year old armed with an entire summer vacation of free time and no worries about having to pay bills? I'm more impressed when a 35 year old with a family is able to learn to be a developer.

seanlinehan• 14 years ago

You certainly have a point here. When I was in high school I could spend exorbitant amounts of time debugging stupid errors caused by inexperience. I could read programming books, play around with code, build completely useless stuff just to learn, etc. for entire months. Now that I work for a startup and am a full time student, I only dream for that type of time.

Though, I think there is a pretty fair trade-off between time and understanding. I can pick up new skills (non-technical included) in less than half the time it would have taken me at 14. I've learned how to learn. Shipping an app at 14 is impressive not because they were able to do something difficult, but because they were able to do something difficult with much, much less life experience than is expected. This is to say that, although they have more time, it is, in general, more difficult for a young person to learn how to program. That is why I'm impressed when I see a 14 year old ship.

gtd2• 14 years ago

To say nothing of brain plasticity.

However actually shipping when you're that young is hard. It was not til I was 19 or 20 that I finally felt like I could write "real" software. The pieces just never fell into place before that despite dabbling for a decade or more as a child. Granted the web as it exists today makes it infinitely easier to learn today than it was when I was a kid, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse. Even with Google in all its glory I can't say unequivocally that I would be shipping code if I were 14 today.

chris_p3• 14 years ago

> Granted the web as it exists today makes it infinitely easier to learn today than it was when I was a kid, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse.

You should. It's not just Google: Communities like HN, stackoverflow and reddit provide motivation and help when you need it. Now, with MOOCs being the latest trend in education, anyone can take university-level courses from world-renown on many topics for free.

> Even with Google in all its glory I can't say unequivocally that I would be shipping code if I were 14 today.

Are you sure? Why do you think age actually plays a role in a person's ability to ship code?

anatari• 14 years ago

Hate to be a Debbie downer, but I have a hard time seeing the economics of this working out for the publisher although I'm sure it's a great experience for the kids. Most of these apps probably won't break even so they will need to have a mega hit to make it work, which seems unlikely given the competition of professionally made large budget (comparatively) games and extremely talented and dedicated indie developers.

zanny2• 14 years ago

As someone still learning a lot about development (I would really like to meet someone who isn't...), I can't help but be somewhat jealous of the upstart devs in the 80s and 90s who just had terminals, text editors, make and ANSI C. The raw knowledge base required to establish a base for oneself is tremendous now. And the paradigms of programming have only become more and more complex, since everything needs networking, multicore, heterogeneous computing, and security is harder than ever.

goldfeld2• 14 years ago

However I do find bootstrapping yourself a web app is way easier today than say, 10 years ago. The tools are efficient and a pleasure to work with. Frameworks increasingly abstract out many pains so you can focus on your problem (e.g. Meteor). You might have to spend a few days getting a hang of all the different options before committing to one of them, but once you're set, you can get up and running really quickly.

zanny2• 14 years ago

But at the same time understanding the web itself has become much harder. CSS3 / html5 / ECMAscript 5.1 / JS 1.85 (I looked them up, I can't remember any real fundamental JS changes that have happened recently since they added let) are all much more complex standards. I mean, the number of tags in html5 was increased by, like, 50%?.

Sure, at least now the standards are much more stable than in the 90s (I can't imagine trying to keep up with the rapid and constant platform lock in gotchas between netscape and ie...) but learning all that stuff takes a lot longer.

It is like how you can start a car easier today than you could in 1920. The car is much more complex, but the abstractions built on top of that have made it as easy as turning a key rather than having to rev the engine, crank it up, etc. But anyone trying to be an automechanic is expected to know the fine grained details of the modern combustion engine and all the quirks auto manufacturers use to make them more efficient and performant, or else they don't come off as "professional".

I feel the same way with any development role. It doesn't feel professional if I don't know the whole stack behind it. And the stack, like the car, has only gotten taller. Average Joe can pick up Drupal or jquery + bootstrap + rails and crank out a pretty neat web app, but the second their tools don't cover some use case and they are forced to look at things like the TCP stack, packet headers, http headers, etc, and they look lost, they also look bad at what they are doing.

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

The mid-late 80's were also a good time to be a 14-year-old developer.

Computers were $200, and booted straight into a development environment, and came with sufficient printed documentation to actually learn that language.

At that time, the budget for low budget commercial games was 1-3 man-months of effort, very much within the reach of amateurs.

There also existed a good market for amateur productions -- things like the "disk of the month" clubs.

I was able to produce a game in a weekend, and sell it for one to two hundred dollars. If you factor in inflation, that's a pretty good wage for someone who's just learning and playing around.

The market for cheap, easy to make games dried up in the 90s. Even successful shareware games required a level of polish, effort and knowledge out of reach of most 14 year olds.

I'm really happy to see that 14 year olds can once again have experiences similar to mine. I hope it lasts, but it does appear that mobile development is shifting to the more standard "winner takes all" marketplace.

gtd2• 14 years ago

Unless you had a Mac, in which case $200 was the price of simply buying the API reference (Inside Macintosh), without which your pirated copy of Think C was inscrutable.

I did do some cool stuff in HyperTalk though.

zoowar• 14 years ago

It's never been easier to be a young developer either.

yen223• 14 years ago

On the flip side, there's never been a more terrible time to be a 54-year-old developer.

hoov• 14 years ago

I think the statement "There's never been a better time to be a 14-year old developer" is always true – things keep getting better.

k2xl• 14 years ago

I have a feeling a very high percentage of programmers on HN themselves started when they were 13-15 years old.

Luyt• 14 years ago

I too, started young. This is from my personal site:

I was born in the mid-sixties and got in touch with software programming at an early age. It became my hobby, along with the field of electronics. I was very keen to get to know exactly how things worked and what was happening, even up to the level of the silicon. In those days I spent more time reading datasheets and computer manuals than I did reading comics.

During my whole career in secondary school (VWO-B) I have been able to follow the development of the microcomputer. As far as that goes, I grew up in a very interesting era. It was the period in which the 'computing power' migrated from the centralized mainframes to various decentralized systems.

Due to my innate interest I became acquainted with all sorts of programming languages and fields of application for computers; I absorbed a lot of knowledge regarding the subjects that interested me the most. At the time, the topics were C, data communication, audiovisual applications, and relational databases, first on C/PM and later on MSDOS. Some years later, C++, Unix, and Windows were added. And after a while I also acquired knowledge of the Internet, the WWW, and programming languages such as Java, Java script, PHP, and Python.

When I was twenty years old I managed to get a job as a software developer, and since this line of work has never ceased to interest me I am currently still active as a developer.

There’s never been a better time to be a 14-year-old developer

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