
Time for the ‘teenage coding god’ meme to die - dsr12
http://positech.co.uk/cliffsblog/2017/01/21/time-for-the-teenage-coding-god-meme-to-die/
======
kevinwang
No, this article is baseless. Teenagers can be great coders, just like adults
can be.

Swartz:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz)

Tourist:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich)

George Hotz:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz)

And really, the "teenage coding god" meme is just a specific instantiation of
the concept of young prodigies. Terrence Tao, Mozart, Ramanujan, Bobby
Fischer. So the claim that teenagers can't be competent at their art because
of their youth seems silly.

~~~
dursk
For any meaningful discussion on this subject to take place, we have to first
specify what we mean by "great coders". The skillset required to win
programming competitions is very different than what it takes to build
maintainable & scalable production systems.

~~~
nilkn
Mathematics has a similar phenomenon. Not every great performer at the IMO
(and similar) becomes a great researcher, although overall they certainly do
better than the average. And even the most prodigious IMO performers rarely do
any meaningful research until after completing a PhD later in life.

Terence Tao is an example of someone extremely prodigious at math competitions
who also ended up being one of the world's best researchers. And he also
didn't really do meaningful research until after his PhD.

~~~
credit_guy
I think "better than the average" is an understatement. I think they do much,
much, much better than the average. While not very great IMO performer becomes
great researcher (example: a friend of mine with 2 gold medals who didn't
finish his Ph.D. because of mental illness), I think that most of them do
become good researchers, if they choose a career in research. Of course, many
go and join Wall Street or Sillicon Valley, so it's hard to say what their
potential could have been.

------
mrec
Carmack has commented on this piece: "I was making a dent at 19, but in 1990,
the game industry didn't have many graybeards. I wouldn't have been so
impressive at Bell Labs..."

------
tptacek
_Firstly, its much easier to break something than build it. You build software
with 100,000 lines of code and 1 line has a potential exploit? you did a good
job 99,999 times_

I found this article hard to read after getting to this point.

~~~
efraim
Why?

~~~
tptacek
Among other things, because "it's harder to build things than to break them"
is a hoary and largely discredit trope. And of course because the "got things
right 99,999 times" thing betrays a lack of understanding of how software
works.

~~~
lutusp
> Among other things, because "it's harder to build things than to break them"
> is a hoary and largely discredit trope.

The application of that argument in this context might be misguided, but it is
certainly true that it is much easier to destroy something than to build it in
the first place. The reason is entropy -- highly ordered systems are
particularly vulnerable to unraveling in the face of this natural law.

~~~
tptacek
That may be true in the abstract, but it is entirely false in the particulars.
Everybody can, for instance, design a cipher they can't themselves break; most
competent developers could, within a few weeks of self-directed training, add
a feature to Chrome. Try breaking Chrome.

~~~
lutusp
My point was a simple one -- entropy isn't a "hoary and largely discredit
trope." It's a very well-established principle, grounded in copious evidence.

> Try breaking Chrome.

Happens every day. Google must remain constantly vigilant for this possibility
and offers substantial monetary rewards to those able to break it:

[https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/chrome-
rewards/](https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/chrome-rewards/)

If breaking Chrome was a practical impossibility as you suggest, this program
wouldn't exist or pay out rewards. But that's false.

Source: [http://www.eweek.com/blogs/security-watch/google-
increases-b...](http://www.eweek.com/blogs/security-watch/google-increases-
bug-bounty-payouts.html)

Quote "Since that first set of bug bounties was paid in 2010, Google has paid
out over $1.25 million and fixed some 700 reported bugs."

------
djrogers
FTA: "Most coders look pretty boring. Most of us are pretty boring. "

Yeah, ok - so you just rebutted your entire thesis here. Why would writers,
directors, and producers want to have 'boring' characters in their movies and
shows? It's fiction. Entertainment. That's it.

Do you watch Brooklyn Nine Nine or Longmire and think "that must be exactly
what cops are like..."?

------
menssen
Apparently it is also preposterous for young-ish adult working-age women to be
good programmers.

(Mackenzie Davis, the "Halt and Catch Fire" photo, is in her late 20s, and
Alice Wetterling, the "Silicon Valley" photo, early 30s.)

------
zx2c4
"Firstly…lets get something straight., The ‘cleverest’ programmers are not
usually ‘hackers’. Firstly, its much easier to break something than build it.
You build software with 100,000 lines of code and 1 line has a potential
exploit? you did a good job 99,999 times, versus a hacker who finds that one
exploit. "

Having done a fair bit of both over the last two decades, I'm afraid I have to
disagree here...

Writing good solid code is a skill, gained with focus and experience.

Reversing, auditing, exploiting are also on their own difficult skills, gained
with focus and experience.

Saying one is "much easier" than the other is to entirely misunderstand either
building or hacking or both.

------
_raoulcousins
Has the author seen Silicon Valley? Alice Wetterlund's character isn't a
teenager.

------
golergka
If anything, Silicon Valley did actually subvert this meme.

------
leecarraher
it's the same trope as the "all people with autism are secret math geniuses",
"nerds lack social skills", etc. the ending of the abomination, "the big bang
theory" show will hopefully usher in at least some change... but unlikely,
hollywood hates prejudice, but somehow can't overcome stereotypes.

------
mmjaa
I was a teenager coding god. 30 years ago. Now I'm just a creepy old guy who
hangs out with teenagers.

------
iseanstevens
Carmack did a bunch of exceptional work by like 20/21 years old right?

Sometimes people are brilliant even when they are young.

Calling out Hollywood for exaggerating seems kind of silly, I thought that was
the point - creating interesting experiences that may be largely synthetic.

~~~
frostmatthew
> Carmack did a bunch of exceptional work by like 20/21 years old right?

According to Carmack himself[1]: "I was making a dent at 19, but in 1990, the
game industry didn't have many graybeards. I Wouldn't have been so impressive
at Bell Labs"

[1]
[https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/825718689458708480](https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/825718689458708480)

------
cLeEOGPw
Nobody wants to watch a show with mundane, uninspired, boring everyday
characters, that have nothing special about them. OP needs to learn about
tropes and character design before criticizing, because he clearly can see
only his point of view.

------
tomc1985
Half of his examples come from a time when computing was much younger, with an
underground absolutely _saturated_ by those types. Citing WarGames/Hackers
inadvertently argues against his point.

------
widforss
Isn't the kid in War Games rather nuanced? It was a while since i watched it,
but looking for passwords in a drawer and war dialing is not exactly highly
sophisticated h4x0r-skills.

~~~
onion2k
_looking for passwords in a drawer and war dialing is not exactly highly
sophisticated h4x0r-skills_

Some of the best hacks are simple things that work well.

------
shawndumas
Question, how good was a teenaged John Carmack?

~~~
ahipple
Given that he started publishing games before he was 20 and had produced
Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, and a couple of Dooms before he was 25, I'd guess
he was well on his way in his teens.

Not to say that success correlates with skills, I suppose, but he's fairly
well-regarded as an innovator from an early age. Odd choice of example from
the article's author.

------
bane
The "teenage coding god" archetype (not going to use meme on this), is one
that I think doesn't have enough thought put into how it formed and why it
exists. Early computing was very sober, very adult, work...principally because
the equipment was incredibly expensive and fragile and the people who ran it
tended to come from academic and government backgrounds.

[http://img.tfd.com/cde/_ENIAC.JPG](http://img.tfd.com/cde/_ENIAC.JPG)

The public knew about these computers, and their promise and the incredible
value they were providing to society, but didn't know much else. When mini-
computers came out, computing was still very much confined to corporate
offices and operated by working age to senior salaried workers.

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/ESO_Hewl...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/ESO_Hewlett_Packard_2116_minicomputer.jpg)

But microcomputers (what we might call "personal computers" today) were the
first to enter homes. Use in business kept to the same general class of
employee, but at home, busy parents simply didn't have time to learn the
arcane commands and methods of operation. That had to fall to people with lots
and lots of time and the mental capacity to understand these early computers.
The perfect demographic for that were teenagers and college students.

[https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-
public/thumbnails/imag...](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-
public/thumbnails/image/2015/01/23/03/5787367.jpg)

[https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-
public/styles/story_me...](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-
public/styles/story_medium/public/thumbnails/image/2015/01/23/03/5787364.jpg)

Early personal computing is very much a reflection of these people, their
interests and their economic realities...it took the form of mostly games, but
also the formulation of the piracy scene, which begat the art movement known
as the demoscene, and many many hacking tools and techniques.

The early British microcomputer market was almost entirely made up of teenage
bedroom coders writing games for teenage bedroom consumers. It was only the
computer manufactuers and software publishers and their business relationships
that tended to have an average age older than 18.

It was also these "kids" who brought new ideas into computing. Advertisements
for what could be done with micros fixated on recipes, word processing,
personal finance and vague "education" statements...and that was pretty much
it. Would we have have of what we have today if all these teens hadn't shown
that there were so many more possibilities with these devices?

