Programming prodigy passes away at 16

I hate to write this, since the tragic happening but really, the hype is widely unjustified.

I started programming when I was 8, I know a lot of people that started meddling around with computer around the same age, and I was born a decade before her which, in computer years, is like a century. Everything programming related was a hundred times more difficult to accomplish than it is now - I wrote assembly on a C64, because that's all my poor family could afford, with nothing more than a printsheet of the opcodes. And no internet, keep that in mind. And I won't say I'm a prodigy because of that.

I am also an MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) and I can tell you that the exam was nothing but difficult - basically, it had nothing to do with actual programming and more with knowing what checkbox to flag. I studied for it the evening before the test.

I've seen so many stories like this, most of them not as tragic and not as heartwarming. For example, a heir of a very wealth family that I know has been featured in at least 10 Italian newspapers as "the new Mark Zuckerberg" or "the 20 years-old startupper" or "the genius behind ", all because his family has deep ties with the editors.

That has taught me never to believe a thing of what I read on something even vaguely institutionalized.

"world's youngest MSP" is still pretty meaningless.

I have no clue why this is even on hacker news, let alone top story.

I don't know quite what Pakistan's cultural norms are, but I suspect that being female, the "youngest MCP" thing may have been even that much more remarkable.

No no no not at all - Sorry if it came out that way.

On a personal level, I am deeply sorry for her death. Given time, she might have become a great programmer.

On a more general level, when I see something like this on the news, I can't help but ask myself why exactly somebody has written an article about this particular person. In this case, it doesn't seem to me that she was the prodigy they're talking about. A smart kid with a will to improve herself? Certainly. But think about the context - she came from a very rich Pakistani family. What would you think, as a 16 year old boy from Pakistan, coming from a poor family and working your bones off to make a living, coding at night, of this story? Because, you know, it's very likely that there's somebody like the boy in question in Pakistan.

Scope mixing is the bane of modern communication. You can't use empathy as an excuse to talk about anything. This personal tragedy should have remained personal, not brought up on the news. Just my humble opinion.

Sure being an "MCP" in the HN circle is absolutely meaningless and doesn't warrant the title "programming prodigy", but that's not the point of this article. The point is that this was a girl who came from a third world country where women are not treated as well as men are in the West, and made it to the Redmond campus based on her own ambition and drive to do something for herself.