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How is it possible to be a developer when a kid is 6 years old?
12 points by ck3g on June 5, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 14 comments
Nat Friedman in his "Hello, GitHub" letter saying "I've been a developer since I was six". (https://natfriedman.github.io/hello)

How is that possible?

I have a 7yo daughter, she is in the first grade of school. She barely can read and count. I understand she is not a wunderkind. I guess there are a lot of smarter kids around. But even with this knowledge, she is ahead of the majority in her class.

I'm trying to play with her in "Scratch Jr" app (https://www.scratchjr.org) and teach her a little bit algorithmic thinking. But she can do that on the very base level. She still struggles with the number of numbers she needs to put in the building blocks.

Can I call her a developer? In my understanding: No!

What is the bare minimum to be qualified as a developer? Especially when you are six.



I think one of the most important questions here that's missing is this:

Should a 6 year old really be learning development/programming if they haven't shown interest?

I have kids at about 6yo and really, I can't see any positive effects it would have if I stick them in front of a computer. Maybe I'm just a hippie dev, but I believe focus should be put on happiness, play, creativity and logical thinking adapted to the children. Kids stuck in front of computers will lose many of social skills needed to get ahead in life.

I'm born in the 80's and I started becoming interested in computers at around age 12-13. I now run a successful company in software dev and my role is full stack dev.

It's my personal opinion, and you're her father, but maybe you should put off trying to teach her Scratch at this young age. Focus on everything she does beautifully instead.

No kid can be a developer at age six. Nat Friedman is spinning to get him positioned as a part of the GitHub audience.


To be clear. I am not forcing her to use that app to much. We do that as much as she likes. And I can see she has fun seeing "a cat moving along the street".


Ok, hope you didn't interpret it as I was judgemental of parenting. If so, I apologize.


No, not at all.


By Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Not calling Nat stupid here (he probably knows his craft better than I ever will in my life), but I don't really think he's lying maliciously.

He most likely means the age at which he opened his first IDE and wrote hello world, probably guided by some sort of basic "learn to code" website/book. A developer should be someone well-versed enough in their respective platform that, given requirements for a project, is able to implement those requirements in desired fashion, while also dealing with all the problems associated with such an undertaking (ie bugs, optimizations, etc). It is often confused with programmer though, and programmer is a much more loose term that can refer to someone who made 1 line of hello world to someone who makes software that flies an airplane, and I assume that would have been the more accurate wording in this case.


The most likely explanation is that Nat Friedman lied.

At the very least, we know that he exaggerated the definition of "developer" in attempt to gain credibility.


I think you should take it to mean that Nat has been programming since age 6.

Teaching your daughter is great. Who cares how she stacks up against Nat Friedman or anyone else? Achievement doesn't always lead to happiness, and it sounds like she has a lot of achievement ahead of her anyway.


I started playing with Commodore 64 Basic at 6 or 7. Nothing fancy, just some "10 INPUT A, 20 PRINT A".

I used my father as a beta tester, he was impressed.

Then I switched to GWBasic on an 8086. Spent endless hours randomly messing with other programs source code.

By the time I was 11 or 12 I wrote my first fully functional program. And it was compiled into an executable file with Turbo Basic!

By then, I saw myself as a fully qualified developer.

Ah, memories :) I


I can definitely remember writing some crappy GWBasic "programs" when I was 7 or 8 - basically PRINT and GOTOs, and they even had some logic! I was very, very bored (no TV for instance) and I only had the GWBASIC manual and access to an 8088.

And my stepfather helped me write a calculator program in C when I was 10 or so (but I didn't really understand C).

I wouldn't call that a "developer" by any stretch of the imagination, I guess Nat was exaggerating.


I doubt he blatantly lied; I take it to mean that most likely he started playing with a language and wrote a hello-world program (or similar) at that age.

I first "wrote code" at 8-9. I was in 3rd-4th grade (I started school early), my older brother was in 7th-8th grade and had his first computer classes at school, which had PC Logo at 7th and Quick Pascal at 8th grades (school in Asia). He showed them to me and I wrote lines that made the turtle move in PC Logo, and wrote Quick Pascal programs that spit back out what the user typed in. I imagine he went through something similar.

I soon stopped playing with them, and didn't get back into programming until 13-14 when I first made web sites in HTML and learned writing CGI scripts in Perl, that was the late 90s.

I think I can imagine playing with code slightly younger than I was when I first did.


I started at 7 using QBasic. I mean it wasn't amazing programs that I was making for sure. But it was really cool to make the computer play songs and show different text. I wasn't doing IF statements and I think the most complicated thing I did was making a FOR loop. Eventually as I got older I could modify existing programs like NIBBLES to have more levels or be more difficult. In the third grade I started coding stuff to do my Math homework taking 10x as long to actually do the work but having a lot more fun at least.

It wasn't until College though that I started doing the real cool stuff using C++ and Java. I most definitely wasn't a typical kid though. I just kind of had a knack for stuff like that.


According to my mother, I was an unusually bright kid, and I started to use computers as soon as I knew how to read. Having been part of a trial to start primary school at 6 instead of 7, I reckon I would've known how to read properly within a year of that. Computer games weren't all that interesting to play, but boy was I curious about what made them tick, and I got into programming very quickly because of that. It's quite funny to be 35 and have close to 30 years of experience. It's true, but I can't put that on my resume, because nobody would believe it.


when I was quite young I was playing around with Simons' Basic. I not sure exactly how old I was, but I was definitely under 10. No one was helping me or guiding me, we just happened to have the cartridge and the manual and a C64 and I was a curious and bored kid who loved playing computer games.

I'm not presumptuous enough to say I was a developer at that point, but I guess if you squint and stretch a bit it could be a bit true.


The fact that Simons' was written by a 16 year old implies he started quite young! Amazing stuff.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simons%27_BASIC




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