

There’s never been a better time to be a 14-year-old developer - jaf12duke
http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/09/theres-never-been-a-better-time-to-be-a-14-year-old-developer/

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bryanlarsen
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
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.

------
kevinh
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
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
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.

------
gexla
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.

~~~
gtd
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
> 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?

------
Samuel_Michon
_"[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
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.

------
zanny
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
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
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.

~~~
goldfeld
So as I understand your point is that it's more difficult to get down to
'hacking level' today, thought it is surely easier to glue things together
without deeper understanding. Whereas back in the 80s hacking level wasn't so
far from day-to-day development. I agree, I hit these roadblocks every now and
then and at each point I'm confronted with the deeper question of whether I
want to devote time to really grasp what's behind the magic, or is it better
to clutch at workarounds so I can turn up an app faster. I guess in the long
term achieving hacker level has better payoff, but I seldom take the
metaphorical leap.

------
hoov
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.

------
yen223
On the flip side, there's never been a more terrible time to be a 54-year-old
developer.

------
hdra
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
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.

~~~
greenyoda
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.

------
damian2000
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
If you compare making an iOS app now to making a successful Symbian game a few
years ago, it's night and day.

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anatari
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.

------
k2xl
I have a feeling a very high percentage of programmers on HN themselves
started when they were 13-15 years old.

~~~
Luyt
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._

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

