I started at 9 but I don't think you have much to be jealous about. I did it because it was fun and I probably had a bit of a head start in terms of debugging s

I started at 9 but I don't think you have much to be jealous about. I did it because it was fun and I probably had a bit of a head start in terms of debugging skills, but really I don't think the intellectual maturity of someone <= 13 is great enough to severely impact the trajectory of your programming skills and where you find yourself in terms of programming skills at the age of 20 or something. What I know about software architecture and programming concepts now at the age of 20 entirely dwarfs the accumulated knowledge and skills I gained from 9 til 13. I just did not have the intellectual maturity to really understand in a conscious way concepts like closures, types (sums vs products, unions vs records), data structures, algorithm performance (other than a visceral understanding of what is faster), static vs instance functions/variables, manual memory management. And so much more. I think my knowledge and skillset grows exponentially year over year, but in the beginning I did not have much to compound and not enough maturity to gather and own much knowledge and experience. Would I be roughly where I'm at now if I had started at 14 or 15? I've thought about this a lot and I don't know. Other thoughts on this are appreciated. To be clear, I don't for a second regret the time I spent early on learning how to program; it was so much fun and intellectually stimulating. I'm actually quite proud of how early I started.