98% of younger than 18 year olds overestimate their knowledge. I know this from experience from programming forums. I began programming when I was 12 and I mass

98% of younger than 18 year olds overestimate their knowledge. I know this from experience from programming forums. I began programming when I was 12 and I massively overestimated my knowledge when I was 18 years old. (I know there are rare exceptions.) Also depends on the topic. A talented 18 years old can be a very good web designer. Or can solve tricky math/algorithmization problems well. On the other hand a 18 year old (except probably the caliber of Terry Tao) cannot do things where huge amount of experience, learned knowledge and maturity is needed. I am just reading the book 'Programming in Scala'. It is just plain impossible that a 18 year old could design that programming language and could write that book that way. When you read that book you feel the huge amount of knowledge and experience (in everyday programming, in other programming languages, in language design, in compiler writing and in computer science theory) which was needed to create it.