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I don't believe the age argument. At what age was Grace Hopper first introduced to programming? Based on the wikipedia article, Grace Hopper appears to have s

by biot 16y ago

I don't believe the age argument. At what age was Grace Hopper first introduced to programming? Based on the wikipedia article, Grace Hopper appears to have started programming 14 years after getting her PhD and didn't seem to have been hampered by not having started programming before high school. [Insert COBOL joke here.] What about others who have a few more gray hairs than I? When did Seymour Cray, Vint Cerf, Peter Norvig, Tim Berners-Lee, and other early pioneers start programming? I think it's pretty safe to say they didn't have mainframes in their parent's basement growing up that they were programming on since before high school. They had a natural interest and the aptitude to do well in it.

gwern 16y ago
Maybe you ought to look up your examples. > Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "lab". That's not a mainframe, no. But he was still learning a lot about programming.
gvb 16y ago
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper started programming when Howard H. Aiken[1] designed and IBM built a computer[2] for her to program. Seymour Cray was also born before the first usable computers were created. I don't have concrete date, but I strongly suspect the other early pioneers also started programming when they first got access to a computer. I'm a few years younger than the youngest of the quoted pioneers (Tim Berners-Lee, born 1955). My first access to a computer was in my junior year in high school: a DecWriter[3] connected via a 300 baud dial-up modem to a timeshare system, programmed in Basic. (Obsessively. Still. :-O) The limiting factor for pioneers was access to computer. For kids today, access isn't a problem. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I [3] http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Before I got my first computer I read in some book about the first ever chess program that was written to be executed by a room full of people. Hey I thought, no money, but I do have paper, pencils and time. So one sheet became my 'variables', the other my program and I would run my BASIC programs without so much as a keyboard to touch. That's not the fastest way to run your programs but things like 'guess a number' are definitely doable. Shortly after that I got a Saturday job at a local radio shack which gave me access to the real thing. So it's not necessary to have access to computer hardware at all to learn about programming, even though it certainly helps.
_emily 16y ago
It's not actual age that's the issue, it's relative age. If your peers have an eight-year headstart down the learning curve, it's tough. At a low level you internalize: they are god tier, you are not.

by biot 16y ago

gwern 16y ago

Maybe you ought to look up your examples. > Cray was born in 1925 in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to Seymour R. and Lillian Cray. His father was a civil engineer who fostered Cray's interest in science and engineering. As early as the age of ten he was able to build a device out of Erector Set components that converted punched paper tape into Morse code signals. The basement of the family home was given over to the young Cray as a "lab". That's not a mainframe, no. But he was still learning a lot about programming.

gvb 16y ago

Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper started programming when Howard H. Aiken[1] designed and IBM built a computer[2] for her to program. Seymour Cray was also born before the first usable computers were created. I don't have concrete date, but I strongly suspect the other early pioneers also started programming when they first got access to a computer. I'm a few years younger than the youngest of the quoted pioneers (Tim Berners-Lee, born 1955). My first access to a computer was in my junior year in high school: a DecWriter[3] connected via a 300 baud dial-up modem to a timeshare system, programmed in Basic. (Obsessively. Still. :-O) The limiting factor for pioneers was access to computer. For kids today, access isn't a problem. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_H._Aiken [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Mark_I [3] http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/la36.html

jacquesm 16y ago
Before I got my first computer I read in some book about the first ever chess program that was written to be executed by a room full of people. Hey I thought, no money, but I do have paper, pencils and time. So one sheet became my 'variables', the other my program and I would run my BASIC programs without so much as a keyboard to touch. That's not the fastest way to run your programs but things like 'guess a number' are definitely doable. Shortly after that I got a Saturday job at a local radio shack which gave me access to the real thing. So it's not necessary to have access to computer hardware at all to learn about programming, even though it certainly helps.

_emily 16y ago

It's not actual age that's the issue, it's relative age. If your peers have an eight-year headstart down the learning curve, it's tough. At a low level you internalize: they are god tier, you are not.