5 ms·

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

34 points by jaf12duke 14y ago

kevinh 14y 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 14y 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".
  - damian2000 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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_p 14y ago
    On the other hand, today everybody has access to MOOCs, google, communities like HN, reddit, stackoverflow and organizations like MakeGamesWithUs.
  - greenyoda 14y 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_p 14y 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.
- protomyth 14y 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.
  - 14y ago
damian2000 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
- gtd 14y 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_p 14y 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 14y 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.
zanny 14y 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.
- goldfeld 14y 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.
  - zanny 14y 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 14y 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.
- gtd 14y 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 14y ago
It's never been easier to be a young developer either.
yen223 14y ago
On the flip side, there's never been a more terrible time to be a 54-year-old developer.
hoov 14y 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 14y ago
I have a feeling a very high percentage of programmers on HN themselves started when they were 13-15 years old.
- Luyt 14y 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.

34 points by jaf12duke 14y 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 14y 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".
- damian2000 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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_p 14y ago
  On the other hand, today everybody has access to MOOCs, google, communities like HN, reddit, stackoverflow and organizations like MakeGamesWithUs.
- greenyoda 14y 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_p 14y 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.
protomyth 14y 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.
- 14y ago

damian2000 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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 14y 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.
gtd 14y 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_p 14y 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 14y 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.

zanny 14y 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.

goldfeld 14y 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.
- zanny 14y 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 14y 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.

gtd 14y 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 14y ago

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

yen223 14y ago

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

hoov 14y 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 14y ago

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

Luyt 14y 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.