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If you started programming when you were 12 and you've been programming for fun more than 4 hours a day every day since then, you are going to be drastically be

If you started programming when you were 12 and you've been programming for fun more than 4 hours a day every day since then, you are going to be drastically better than someone who starts programming in their first year of college and only does it to graduate. It feels like a bimodal distribution because you then get both kinds of programmers interviewing for jobs at the same age when they graduate from college and one of them is going to feel drastically different than the other.

Sevzinn 11y ago
I'm curious if anybody who starts programming in college would ever write such a message. I think "dusklight" started programming around 12 and programs for fun more than 4 hours a day. I was doing x86 assembly as a teenager and perform terribly compared to at least one person who started in college.
stdbrouw 11y ago
Don't underestimate by how much the speed at which you learn increases as you get older. There's lots of amazing musicians around who only started playing as adults, for example, because aside from a couple of kid geniuses, learning an instrument when you're young is just really, really hard.
- brookside 11y ago
  Not sure I agree it's easier as you get older. Our brains seem to be wired to pick up new languages & skills most rapidly when in youth.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Folks say that, but I think its mainly immersion. We are reluctant to spend the time/energy to immerse ourselves in a new thing when we're older.
    - bpyne 11y ago
      I'm not thoroughly sold on the "too old to learn" adage either. I think it has more to do with time and focus. Since moving into the stage of life in which I have a family and more responsibility in my job, I have considerably less time to focus on learning a new instrument or music theory or ______. I have no doubt that there is an age, beyond which, your brain has degenerated too much to learn. But, I'm not convinced it's as early as 50's or 60's. Hopefully, with better awareness about nutrition, exercise, and stress, we can see people learning music instruments well into their 80's.
rileymat 11y ago
I think you are missing the point. He does not deny that there are people on the tail of the normal curve. But his point would be that there are more people that started at 12 and programmed a couple of hours on the weekend v. 4 hours a day. And there are still more than that that started at 15. This creates a normal curve, not a bimodal.
justinpaulson 11y ago
You created a bimodal distribution because you only talked about two types of people. Some people start later in life, but have an incredible talent for programming. Some people start early because they really like programming, but never achieve the highest levels of proficiency because they lack some natural talent. Like most things, programming is a mix of natural talent and practice. Some people have incredible natural talent and will succeed no mater when they started. Some people will achieve a very productive level of programming with less natural talent because they put in the work to achieve it. There are more than just two archetypes that make up the landscape of developers.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Then, there are those profoundly incapable of programming. My high school classmate who seemed to be getting it, but on the 1st assignment came to me and asked for help. It became clear he had no concept of the ordering of statement. He wrote them like math formulas, and didn't understand that they got executed in order. Fast-forward 3 years; both of us in college. He had to take a programming class again. I met him in the 'computer center' (they used to have special buildings for using computers). He asked for help again; he still didn't understand about statement ordering. I smiled and suggested a tutor. There was just nothing I could say that would get through to him. So no, not everybody will learn to write computer code. Some people are tone-deaf too, and will never sing nor play an instrument.
  - SNvD7vEJ 11y ago
    "He wrote them like math formulas, and didn't understand that they got executed in order." So he had a talent for functional programming, then?
    - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
      Cute, but not quite. Those are still executed in some order. Not like algebra which is a set of expressions that are all true over all time.
xkjkls 11y ago
This seems like a form of elitism very specific to programming. I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and barely did programming until I began my first job out of college. In many people in the programming space, I see contempt that coding was something I didn't start until later in life. When I interviewed for Electrical Engineering positions, no one ever scoffed at me, "you haven't been computing the impulse response of a filter for 4 hours a day since you were 12? There's a massive difference between engineers who have done that and those that haven't."
- exstudent2 11y ago
  I don't think it's elitism, it's just that programming offers a unique opportunity to do this stuff from a very early age from home and the end results is some people end up being very good at it "early" in their career. Unfortunately you couldn't start "computing the impulse response of a filter" when you were 12 but if you could, and you continued to practice it daily, you would be very capable compared to people who just started in university.
  - sulam 11y ago
    You're demonstrating the exact syndrome the story discusses: conflating the ability to write code "well" with all the other things one does as a software engineer. The article goes into more detail, but I do a fair number of things every day that do not involve typing in code on a keyboard. Going further, I would argue that most people I know who've been programming since they were 12 weren't even writing very good code at 22 (or whenever they left college and entered the working world). It's vanishingly rare that people were writing flexible, maintainable code in their teens. It's much more common that they were coding to scratch an itch, and that their code only solves the pieces of the problem they cared about, and probably not very well. Note: I've been programming since I was 12.
    - fizbin 11y ago
      This - that it's extremely rare to even be able to think the right things to produce maintainable code at that age - is why I've long thought that 12-15 is the right age to teach assembly language. At that age, your code is going to be a mess no matter what tools you use, so you might as well have an excuse. (Seriously: there's some brain development that doesn't happen until the close of puberty, and I believe that some of that is necessary for most people to plan and write maintainable code)
cdelsolar 11y ago
I don't know, I've been programming since I was 8 (on my brother's calculator) and I still write horrendous code pretty frequently.
- hckr1292 11y ago
  upvoted for honesty :-)
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
myle 11y ago
a) Half-life of technologies is very short. b) Instead of 10 years experience, maybe someone has 10x 1-year experience. c) To learn theory, data structures, etc maybe university/company provides a better environment than your PSTN connection on the internet (at least that's what we had when I was 12). d) When you get hired in a new environment, almost certainly you will face a codebase that you were not aware of. What mostly matters is your ability to generalize your experience. Because of at least (a) - (d), the condition in the first part of your if statement, does not necessarily imply the second part.

Sevzinn 11y ago

I'm curious if anybody who starts programming in college would ever write such a message. I think "dusklight" started programming around 12 and programs for fun more than 4 hours a day. I was doing x86 assembly as a teenager and perform terribly compared to at least one person who started in college.

stdbrouw 11y ago

Don't underestimate by how much the speed at which you learn increases as you get older. There's lots of amazing musicians around who only started playing as adults, for example, because aside from a couple of kid geniuses, learning an instrument when you're young is just really, really hard.

brookside 11y ago
Not sure I agree it's easier as you get older. Our brains seem to be wired to pick up new languages & skills most rapidly when in youth.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  Folks say that, but I think its mainly immersion. We are reluctant to spend the time/energy to immerse ourselves in a new thing when we're older.
  - bpyne 11y ago
    I'm not thoroughly sold on the "too old to learn" adage either. I think it has more to do with time and focus. Since moving into the stage of life in which I have a family and more responsibility in my job, I have considerably less time to focus on learning a new instrument or music theory or ______. I have no doubt that there is an age, beyond which, your brain has degenerated too much to learn. But, I'm not convinced it's as early as 50's or 60's. Hopefully, with better awareness about nutrition, exercise, and stress, we can see people learning music instruments well into their 80's.

rileymat 11y ago

I think you are missing the point. He does not deny that there are people on the tail of the normal curve. But his point would be that there are more people that started at 12 and programmed a couple of hours on the weekend v. 4 hours a day. And there are still more than that that started at 15. This creates a normal curve, not a bimodal.

justinpaulson 11y ago

You created a bimodal distribution because you only talked about two types of people. Some people start later in life, but have an incredible talent for programming. Some people start early because they really like programming, but never achieve the highest levels of proficiency because they lack some natural talent. Like most things, programming is a mix of natural talent and practice. Some people have incredible natural talent and will succeed no mater when they started. Some people will achieve a very productive level of programming with less natural talent because they put in the work to achieve it. There are more than just two archetypes that make up the landscape of developers.

JoeAltmaier 11y ago
Then, there are those profoundly incapable of programming. My high school classmate who seemed to be getting it, but on the 1st assignment came to me and asked for help. It became clear he had no concept of the ordering of statement. He wrote them like math formulas, and didn't understand that they got executed in order. Fast-forward 3 years; both of us in college. He had to take a programming class again. I met him in the 'computer center' (they used to have special buildings for using computers). He asked for help again; he still didn't understand about statement ordering. I smiled and suggested a tutor. There was just nothing I could say that would get through to him. So no, not everybody will learn to write computer code. Some people are tone-deaf too, and will never sing nor play an instrument.
- SNvD7vEJ 11y ago
  "He wrote them like math formulas, and didn't understand that they got executed in order." So he had a talent for functional programming, then?
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    Cute, but not quite. Those are still executed in some order. Not like algebra which is a set of expressions that are all true over all time.

xkjkls 11y ago

This seems like a form of elitism very specific to programming. I graduated with a degree in Electrical Engineering, and barely did programming until I began my first job out of college. In many people in the programming space, I see contempt that coding was something I didn't start until later in life. When I interviewed for Electrical Engineering positions, no one ever scoffed at me, "you haven't been computing the impulse response of a filter for 4 hours a day since you were 12? There's a massive difference between engineers who have done that and those that haven't."

exstudent2 11y ago
I don't think it's elitism, it's just that programming offers a unique opportunity to do this stuff from a very early age from home and the end results is some people end up being very good at it "early" in their career. Unfortunately you couldn't start "computing the impulse response of a filter" when you were 12 but if you could, and you continued to practice it daily, you would be very capable compared to people who just started in university.
- sulam 11y ago
  You're demonstrating the exact syndrome the story discusses: conflating the ability to write code "well" with all the other things one does as a software engineer. The article goes into more detail, but I do a fair number of things every day that do not involve typing in code on a keyboard. Going further, I would argue that most people I know who've been programming since they were 12 weren't even writing very good code at 22 (or whenever they left college and entered the working world). It's vanishingly rare that people were writing flexible, maintainable code in their teens. It's much more common that they were coding to scratch an itch, and that their code only solves the pieces of the problem they cared about, and probably not very well. Note: I've been programming since I was 12.
  - fizbin 11y ago
    This - that it's extremely rare to even be able to think the right things to produce maintainable code at that age - is why I've long thought that 12-15 is the right age to teach assembly language. At that age, your code is going to be a mess no matter what tools you use, so you might as well have an excuse. (Seriously: there's some brain development that doesn't happen until the close of puberty, and I believe that some of that is necessary for most people to plan and write maintainable code)

cdelsolar 11y ago

I don't know, I've been programming since I was 8 (on my brother's calculator) and I still write horrendous code pretty frequently.

hckr1292 11y ago
upvoted for honesty :-)
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

myle 11y ago

a) Half-life of technologies is very short. b) Instead of 10 years experience, maybe someone has 10x 1-year experience. c) To learn theory, data structures, etc maybe university/company provides a better environment than your PSTN connection on the internet (at least that's what we had when I was 12). d) When you get hired in a new environment, almost certainly you will face a codebase that you were not aware of. What mostly matters is your ability to generalize your experience. Because of at least (a) - (d), the condition in the first part of your if statement, does not necessarily imply the second part.