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How is it possible to be a developer when a kid is 6 years old?
11–17 of 17 posts
Re: How is it possible to be a developer when a kid is 6 years old?
#12According 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.
Re: How is it possible to be a developer when a kid is 6 years old?
#13I 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…
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.
Re: How is it possible to be a developer when a kid is 6 years old?
#14I 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.
Re: How is it possible to be a developer when a kid is 6 years old?
#15when 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 b…
The fact that Simons' was written by a 16 year old implies he started quite young! Amazing stuff.
Re: How is it possible to be a developer when a kid is 6 years old?
#16By 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.
Re: How is it possible to be a developer when a kid is 6 years old?
#17I 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.