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Hey! Really cool stuff. I'm 15, and have been programming since I was 9, but I'm more focused in stuff like Systems Programming and Machine Learning, thus I have not really released anything interesting.
Oh? What are you working on? Do you have any code available?
Why are so many HNers being dismissive of this young fella? He has done something cool and he is really proud of that. He learnt something that is considered very hard for the majority of population and put his work out there on app store for real test (by real users). Lets applaud him (like some of the posters).
EDIT: Don't forget to contact your users. They will give you feedback and it will help you improve your game and write newer games/apps.
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Sometimes I'm a bit skeptical about these kinds of posts "I'm X age, I made this". I feel like, why would a 14 year old want to make sure his age is on the post title?. It's not that extraordinary I think, I mean it's great that his doing this, but it's not that un-ordinary, sometimes it seems like someone else is driving this for promo.
Because they know that they'll be praised for it and probably manage to sell a couple of copies. It also makes sense as something to put on a higher-ed application or CV ("I can already write commercially successful pieces of software, I got X comment from Y developer and sold N units").
That said, you're probably right in suspecting that this is partially driven by someone other than OP. The landing page of MakeGamesWith.Us has Cheese Miners on the front page along with the text: "It's so easy we got high school students to do it".
However, regardless of OP's motivation, it is well worthwhile applauding them on a job well done at such a young age. There are nowhere near enough teenagers taking up programming[0], and I hope that success stories like this will encourage more young people to at least get their feet wet with this financially and mentally rewarding craft.
[0]: This is especially troubling given the ubiquity of free development environments and online instructional material.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's even funnier is everyone in the comments "casually" mentioning that when they were 14 they were doing X or Y or Z. Even in congratulating a kid, people here must brag and not feel left out. No matter how smart, humans stay humans. It's cute.
I did what you mentioned (saying what I was doing when I was 14), and I can assure you I wasn't bragging(!) in the slightest bit (it didn't even occur to me) and I'm certain others are on the same boat. Most are reminiscing... How times have changed, our old, beloved tools, etc. You're just being a little bit pessimistic, I think! ;-)
The whole thing was crap. The book was slow, boring, and made little sense. The IDE was completely unfamiliar and strange; I couldn't grasp how things connected together. I showed my uncle the book and proudly told him I was going to learn to program, and what he thought of it (he's a lifelong programmer); he said it was probably better as a reference and left it at that.
I lost interest soon, as I couldn't figure out much of anything useful from the book. I came back to it a few months later, and a few months after that to try again, each time making less progress and losing interest faster.
Some years later, in my last year of high school, I took an intro programming course at the local community college and rediscovered my love of it. I did well, often helping other students, only to have my interest utterly burned out of me when I took the "culling" compsci course at my university a few years later. I busted my ass and failed miserably, and ended up thinking that I just wasn't cut out to be a programmer.
It's been a few years since then, and I'm slowly starting to get back on the horse and learn on my own; reading HN has been a great help with this, as I doubt I would have found quality resources like Eloquent Javascript otherwise. But I feel like there were multiple opportunities in my life to learn and enjoy programming from a young age, and seeing other people have the same thing but succeed is a painful reminder of my own lost chances and failures.
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Hey! Really cool stuff. I'm 15, and have been programming since I was 9, but I'm more focused in stuff like Systems Programming and Machine Learning, thus I have not really released anything interesting.
> Systems Programming and Machine Learning Oh? What are you working on? Do you have any code available?