A thing that, I think, is often overlooked is that when you start at something like this at a very young age you can miss important lessons. I don't have a conc

A thing that, I think, is often overlooked is that when you start at something like this at a very young age you can miss important lessons. I don't have a concrete example, exactly, but I literally cannot remember starting to program - I just always have. The upside of that is that a ton of stuff is deeply internalized in me that I know newbies have a hard time "getting" at first. The downside, though, is probably the first 10 or 12 years of my programming life I spent doing things in weird ways with bad abstractions because I had no one to show me otherwise. (And at first I may have been too young to even grasp some abstractions anyway.) That can be a good learning experience because I learned a lot from "first principals" so-to-speak, but it also means that for many many years my programming skills were not well-directed and the process was extremely inefficient. By starting later in life you can avoid wasting so much time. It's not as hard to "catch up" to someone like me who has been doing it my whole life as you might expect. (Also, there's this neat thing called "The Internet" now... :)