Time for the ‘teenage coding god’ meme to die | Hacker News Reader

Time for the ‘teenage coding god’ meme to die

positech.co.uk

44 pointsdsr1236 comments

No, this article is baseless. Teenagers can be great coders, just like adults can be.

Swartz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Tourist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gennady_Korotkevich

George Hotz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

And really, the "teenage coding god" meme is just a specific instantiation of the concept of young prodigies. Terrence Tao, Mozart, Ramanujan, Bobby Fischer. So the claim that teenagers can't be competent at their art because of their youth seems silly.

For any meaningful discussion on this subject to take place, we have to first specify what we mean by "great coders". The skillset required to win programming competitions is very different than what it takes to build maintainable & scalable production systems.

Mathematics has a similar phenomenon. Not every great performer at the IMO (and similar) becomes a great researcher, although overall they certainly do better than the average. And even the most prodigious IMO performers rarely do any meaningful research until after completing a PhD later in life.

Terence Tao is an example of someone extremely prodigious at math competitions who also ended up being one of the world's best researchers. And he also didn't really do meaningful research until after his PhD.

I think "better than the average" is an understatement. I think they do much, much, much better than the average. While not very great IMO performer becomes great researcher (example: a friend of mine with 2 gold medals who didn't finish his Ph.D. because of mental illness), I think that most of them do become good researchers, if they choose a career in research. Of course, many go and join Wall Street or Sillicon Valley, so it's hard to say what their potential could have been.

I think the difference is that the article is saying that truly "great" programmers come with experience. Experience you can't have at 15.

Which is something I can get behind.

The 15 year old programmer can most DEFINITELY be a "prodigy" and will without hesitation have a leg up on most people - including the fact that (s)he will get the experience "sooner" than most. At 25, (s)he will have a decade of experience. At 37, I'm coming up on 6ish years of experience as a programmer (Late bloomer and what not).

That doesn't change the fact that being a "prodigy" doesn't give the breathe and depths of experience that comes with... well... time and age.

The meme skips over the reality that such genius is often accompanied by serious side effects and mental illness. The thing that makes them a prodigy is the thing that breaks them in other ways. So to the OP's credit, you wouldn't want a company staffed with prodigies, but to the memes credit, you would want at least one if you're able to support their unconventional needs.

Carmack has commented on this piece: "I was making a dent at 19, but in 1990, the game industry didn't have many graybeards. I wouldn't have been so impressive at Bell Labs..."

Firstly, its much easier to break something than build it. You build software with 100,000 lines of code and 1 line has a potential exploit? you did a good job 99,999 times

I found this article hard to read after getting to this point.

But the system has five-nines security!

Off by one errror.. The ‘cleverest’ programmers are not usually ‘hackers’. in combination with above was the kicker for me

Why?

Among other things, because "it's harder to build things than to break them" is a hoary and largely discredit trope. And of course because the "got things right 99,999 times" thing betrays a lack of understanding of how software works.

> Among other things, because "it's harder to build things than to break them" is a hoary and largely discredit trope.

The application of that argument in this context might be misguided, but it is certainly true that it is much easier to destroy something than to build it in the first place. The reason is entropy -- highly ordered systems are particularly vulnerable to unraveling in the face of this natural law.

That may be true in the abstract, but it is entirely false in the particulars. Everybody can, for instance, design a cipher they can't themselves break; most competent developers could, within a few weeks of self-directed training, add a feature to Chrome. Try breaking Chrome.

My point was a simple one -- entropy isn't a "hoary and largely discredit trope." It's a very well-established principle, grounded in copious evidence.

> Try breaking Chrome.

Happens every day. Google must remain constantly vigilant for this possibility and offers substantial monetary rewards to those able to break it:

https://www.google.com/about/appsecurity/chrome-rewards/

If breaking Chrome was a practical impossibility as you suggest, this program wouldn't exist or pay out rewards. But that's false.

Source: http://www.eweek.com/blogs/security-watch/google-increases-b...

Quote "Since that first set of bug bounties was paid in 2010, Google has paid out over $1.25 million and fixed some 700 reported bugs."

i think its shades of gray on both sides. Some things are easy to create, some hard. Same for breaking.

The reason is entropy

Breakages in this context are not related to entropy. They are hidden errors that are not detected until long after the system is deployed. For example, the BEAST attack exploited a flaw that was first identified 10 years earlier. Similarly, errors such as padding oracle attacks on badly written encryption code don't decay--they are broken from the beginning and turns out to require exceptional insight to detect.

This is a misapplication of the idea of entropy or decay to real-world software problems.

> This is a misapplication of the idea of entropy or decay to real-world software problems.

For a mathematical equation, or for a computer program that's written and then never touched again, obviously true -- after all, these things aren't part of physics, how could entropy play a role?

But for a computer program or language that's subject to perpetual revision to meet new needs, entropy's role is self-evident. Microsoft Windows is a classic example -- there are parts of Windows that cry out to be removed and replaced, like the presence of drive letters to name just one, except for the requirements of legacy compatibility.

For a sufficiently long-lived program or language, one that's subjected to major revisions over time, something very much like entropy is present and obvious. And the closer to everyday reality the software is, the more subject to user demands and changes, to that same degree the software's history exhibits something like entropy -- until finally the software's maintainers decide to just abandon the effort and start over. Just as with actual physical systems.

FTA: "Most coders look pretty boring. Most of us are pretty boring. "

Yeah, ok - so you just rebutted your entire thesis here. Why would writers, directors, and producers want to have 'boring' characters in their movies and shows? It's fiction. Entertainment. That's it.

Do you watch Brooklyn Nine Nine or Longmire and think "that must be exactly what cops are like..."?

Apparently it is also preposterous for young-ish adult working-age women to be good programmers.

(Mackenzie Davis, the "Halt and Catch Fire" photo, is in her late 20s, and Alice Wetterling, the "Silicon Valley" photo, early 30s.)

"Firstly…lets get something straight., The ‘cleverest’ programmers are not usually ‘hackers’. Firstly, its much easier to break something than build it. You build software with 100,000 lines of code and 1 line has a potential exploit? you did a good job 99,999 times, versus a hacker who finds that one exploit. "

Having done a fair bit of both over the last two decades, I'm afraid I have to disagree here...

Writing good solid code is a skill, gained with focus and experience.

Reversing, auditing, exploiting are also on their own difficult skills, gained with focus and experience.

Saying one is "much easier" than the other is to entirely misunderstand either building or hacking or both.

Has the author seen Silicon Valley? Alice Wetterlund's character isn't a teenager.

If anything, Silicon Valley did actually subvert this meme.

it's the same trope as the "all people with autism are secret math geniuses", "nerds lack social skills", etc. the ending of the abomination, "the big bang theory" show will hopefully usher in at least some change... but unlikely, hollywood hates prejudice, but somehow can't overcome stereotypes.

I was a teenager coding god. 30 years ago. Now I'm just a creepy old guy who hangs out with teenagers.

Carmack did a bunch of exceptional work by like 20/21 years old right?

Sometimes people are brilliant even when they are young.

Calling out Hollywood for exaggerating seems kind of silly, I thought that was the point - creating interesting experiences that may be largely synthetic.

> Carmack did a bunch of exceptional work by like 20/21 years old right?

According to Carmack himself[1]: "I was making a dent at 19, but in 1990, the game industry didn't have many graybeards. I Wouldn't have been so impressive at Bell Labs"

[1] https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/825718689458708480

Nobody wants to watch a show with mundane, uninspired, boring everyday characters, that have nothing special about them. OP needs to learn about tropes and character design before criticizing, because he clearly can see only his point of view.

Half of his examples come from a time when computing was much younger, with an underground absolutely saturated by those types. Citing WarGames/Hackers inadvertently argues against his point.

Isn't the kid in War Games rather nuanced? It was a while since i watched it, but looking for passwords in a drawer and war dialing is not exactly highly sophisticated h4x0r-skills.

looking for passwords in a drawer and war dialing is not exactly highly sophisticated h4x0r-skills

Some of the best hacks are simple things that work well.

they were when you had to write your own dialer in assembly on cp/m when most people hadn't even touched a computer...

Question, how good was a teenaged John Carmack?

Given that he started publishing games before he was 20 and had produced Commander Keen, Wolfenstein, and a couple of Dooms before he was 25, I'd guess he was well on his way in his teens.

Not to say that success correlates with skills, I suppose, but he's fairly well-regarded as an innovator from an early age. Odd choice of example from the article's author.

He started releasing games at 19. So probably pretty good.

I mean, hell, I'm 19 now and a professional web developer. I'm not exactly a "teenage coding god" but I'm definitely good at programming.

The trope exists for a reason. It's not beyond imagination (although it is unrealistic, just like any other trope).

The "teenage coding god" archetype (not going to use meme on this), is one that I think doesn't have enough thought put into how it formed and why it exists. Early computing was very sober, very adult, work...principally because the equipment was incredibly expensive and fragile and the people who ran it tended to come from academic and government backgrounds.

http://img.tfd.com/cde/_ENIAC.JPG

The public knew about these computers, and their promise and the incredible value they were providing to society, but didn't know much else. When mini-computers came out, computing was still very much confined to corporate offices and operated by working age to senior salaried workers.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/ESO_Hewl...

But microcomputers (what we might call "personal computers" today) were the first to enter homes. Use in business kept to the same general class of employee, but at home, busy parents simply didn't have time to learn the arcane commands and methods of operation. That had to fall to people with lots and lots of time and the mental capacity to understand these early computers. The perfect demographic for that were teenagers and college students.

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...

https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/story_me...

Early personal computing is very much a reflection of these people, their interests and their economic realities...it took the form of mostly games, but also the formulation of the piracy scene, which begat the art movement known as the demoscene, and many many hacking tools and techniques.

The early British microcomputer market was almost entirely made up of teenage bedroom coders writing games for teenage bedroom consumers. It was only the computer manufactuers and software publishers and their business relationships that tended to have an average age older than 18.

It was also these "kids" who brought new ideas into computing. Advertisements for what could be done with micros fixated on recipes, word processing, personal finance and vague "education" statements...and that was pretty much it. Would we have have of what we have today if all these teens hadn't shown that there were so many more possibilities with these devices?

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