Going to be honest, when I was 14 and learning to program, I quickly learned how shitty and harsh the internet can be, especially the types that frequented forums.
When I was 12 or so I had an interest in being an artist. I was also playing a game that happened to be looking for art work. Specifically, they wanted some models for new monsters in the game.
I put together my best attempt and submitted it. The work was subsequently torn to shreds by the people on the board, and rightly so: The "monster" looked like a walking boob, and everyone said that the special attack could be to squirt milk.
I wish I'd been old enough to laugh it off, since it's quite hilarious, but in reality I just stopped trying to be a 3D artist. Stuff like this can have a big impact at a young age.
People can, and do, make that same harden-the-fuck-up argument to support any kind of violence. And it makes sense, since perpetrators were always first victims. But on HN, in our internetty and admittedly trivial way, we want to break that cycle. So no, you can't rough up a 12-year-old here—or do anything with a high probability of amounting to that.
Those "no pain no gain" guys with a negative attitude are simply toxic. I was never doubted even when I started to freelance when I was 16y/o.
I simply wrote the code. There's not much room to bullshit your way through it.
I think it's mostly jealous people who see some clean code from a 12y/o (I like the functional programming patterns) and think about their own mediocrity. There's nothing to gain when dealing with those people except cynism. It's almost always better to have an empowering environment. We're not playing Darwin games here and feeling threatened by a 12y/o shows a lack of decency and commitment IMO.
I disagree. I'd say having all of the work in 1 commit makes it more likely to have been created by a young programmer. What impresses me the most, and makes me skeptical, is the good code style. I know at least 3 12 year old programmers who might be able to do this, but none of them have this diligence for style.
The program is short enough and I was enough of a nerd at this age to be interested in doing something like this. I just focused on making poorly-designed computer games instead.
Everything being in 1 commit seems perfectly normal for this situation.
He likely wrote the entire thing without Git (because he's the only one working on it), then decided to push it to BitBucket when he wanted to publish it.