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Comment by MikeCapone | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious to know how that 7th grader heard about PG. It doesn't really matter for the Q&A, but I'm still curious.

I'm guessing that either a Google search with "computer programming"-type keywords return's PG's page, or that it is via a real-life relationship...

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I found PG by looking up the Wikipedia article on "Nerd" and going down to the external links, where his "Why Nerds Are Unpopular" article is.

"... I found PG by looking up the Wikipedia article on "Nerd" ..."

How does the article correspond to what you see at school?

Thank you for answering my question.

I had been writing a little code in php (after dropping out of a backwater community college) when the big 2005-6 ajax web 2.0 wave struck. Digg was huge then and from there I found a site called Valleywag. They had some stuff about Paul Graham,snarky stuff I would read with a lot less interest today at 23 than I would then at 19, I stumbled in to Startup News by way of their link. I was curious; who was this Paul Graham guy? Turns out he was funding young entrepreneurs... I read all of his essays, and while I still haven't taken up writing in Lisp, I've been a fan ever since.

I found PG by googling "why" a day when my life was particularly miserable, and came across the same essay. It was number 2 in the search results.

Every-time a kid googled "hacker", he will come upon "How To Become A Hacker" by Eric Raymond.

So, probably a significant proportion of new programmers were "made" by Raymond.

This brings back memories. Read that article in 7th grade when I had just started using internet. It's still one of my favorite.

I wonder why you searched "hacker" then ?! :)

Yup, that's it. That's also how I discovered Python.

10 year-olds learning to program is quite common, and I'm surprised that you're surprised that a 13 year-old might get far along enough in it to hear the name of a famous technologist.

(I personally learned about PG in 6th grade, after seeing a link from the Steve Yegge's blog [the one for his game; not the later one that made him famous].)

I heard about PG at age 14 reading Slashdot over my dad's shoulder :)

(The essay was What You'll Wish You'd Known, so it's no wonder I got hooked.)

You'd be surprised at the kids these days. I was making websites (or trying, at least) since 2nd grade and I knew names like Jeffery Zeldman and Dan Cederholm from their books and blogs. If I had been interested in slightly different things, I could have easily run across PG earlier than I did.

Agree. I ran into pg in sophomore year in high school while working on an anti-spam project for a client.

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