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I think she also implied that this behavior will be exhibited at a very young age, or not at all. (Which jt2190 also points out below.) She's not the only one t

• lotharbot 13y ago
  I didn't start to program until college, but I would absolutely describe myself as a math hacker starting in elementary school. It's the almost addictive problem-solving mentality that I associate with hacking, not 1s and 0s on a computer. I think if someone doesn't have that sort of mentality, they won't become a hacker no matter how early they're exposed to code -- and if they do have that mentality, they'll become a hacker of some sort whether or not code is the thing that ultimately holds their interest.
• gruseom 13y ago
  > this behavior will be exhibited at a very young age, or not at all That's so obviously false that I doubt she's saying it. I suspect it's more like: these qualities tend to come up in childhood, so if we want to see more of them, that's where we should focus. Everything about your comment ("I figured out HTML on my own") makes me bet you that had these qualities in spades as a kid long before you had a computer. All this existed before computers, after all. I remember Jerry Weinberg saying that he knew he wanted to devote his life to computers from the day Time Magazine ran a futuristic cover story about them in the late 1930s. Another farm kid, as it happens. He went to college to study computers and found they didn't exist yet, so he majored in physics and bided his time until programming became a thing. I wonder sometimes whether any of this is about childhood per se or the fact that children are more likely to do things out of play, to figure stuff out, see what will happen, and so on. If that's it, then we can dispose of the controversy by agreeing that people who come to programming purely as a career or (god forbid) for status will do worse not if they're too old, but if they're too uncurious.
  • scott_s 13y ago
    What I'm trying to describe is the "by 20, it's too late to make a hacker" sentiment, which I do hear people say. So if I did have these qualities, and we're going to identify them after we've already established that I am a hacker, then it must be true that lots of other people also have these qualities, but did not become hackers. My point: the notion that good hackers must be hacking on, and tinkering with, computers at a young age is probably too simplistic.
    • jsmeaton 13y ago
      I think her point was that we can't magically transform random person x, at the age of 22, into a hacker. Not that it can't happen at all, but also that it can't be forced. At least, that's how I chose to take the paragraph. Rarely when someone says "this doesn't happen", they mean it is impossible. Just unlikely. If I've spent the last 10 years being interested in computers, it is unlikely that at the age of 22 I'm going to walk into a mechanic and decide then and there that I'm going to work on cars for the rest of my life. Does it happen though? Definitely. Is it common? Doubt it.
    • HedgeMage 13y ago
      Actually, I made it a point to explain that it doesn't have to be computers... "Even if they lacked computers, they were taking apart alarm clocks, repairing pencil sharpeners or tinkering with ham radios. Some of them built pumpkin launchers or LEGO trains." There are many early maker/hacker experiences that don't require access to or interest in computers. The point was that, at some point early on, every hacker (maybe there's an outlier or three, but I'd be shocked if there were twenty) had some experience digging in and building or fixing or changing something. For me, it started a long time before my exposure to computers. I grew up in a rural area. As early as toddlerhood, I was learning to cook, sew, make candles, weave on a loom, etc. I was making as early as I could hold things and be relied on to keep them out of my mouth. It never occurred to me to throw something away without trying to fix it first, because if something broke, my parents would fix it, and I'd watch or help. It's not about computers and youth, it's about making/fixing/tinkering and youth.
• tmzt 13y ago
  There's more to it than that though. She is talking about hacking not just in the context of programming, but in a range of activities that may lead somebody to program on their own. It's more about the spirit of it. It's possible to be a hacker making web pages, learning what the markup can do, building whatever level of interactivity you could without 'proper programming.' And, possibly, the most important part of it was the 'thrill' you got out of it. Of course there may be women in her example that take to their first LUG meeting and go on to become hackers, but assuming that that will be the result, and planning entire social movements accordingly, seems like a bad bet.
• leoedin 13y ago
  I don't think "hacker" and "programmer" are completely synonymous. The "hacker" attributes that you definitely see in some children - taking apart things (although often failing to put them back together), building things, solving problems - often turn into careers in mechanical engineering, electronics, even sculpture. Programming is just one way of expressing that desire to create and tinker. I don't think all programmers are hackers, and many hackers aren't programmers.