I find it hard to apologize for being lower-middle class at the age of 8-ish. Over the years he clawed his way up to middle-middle class and I did end up with a family computer of more value in my midteens, but, well, again, I have a hard time apologizing for this.
(Which was actually somewhat harder to work with than the C=64, in many ways; open source was terribly young and I had no access to the Internet for quite a while. The BBS software percolation system wasn't necessarily the best. Everything commercial was out of my reach, especially before open source started forcing dev environments down in price.)
There has to be some point where people take responsibility for themselves, after all; nobody forced me to actually learn about it instead of just playing games like all my friends of equal class who also had such machines.
It's just that I don't feel like I can apologize for this or feel bad. It isn't in anybody's best interest for me to try to pretend this was somehow bad.
My 8 year-old and I are starting a side project to build Ubuntu machines out of discarded parts for low income families in our city. One of the reasons we're doing this is that kid out there who might be a genius programmer, but would otherwise never get the chance to hack a kernel or troll a newb on IRC.
Good luck with that project -- if you find even one kid like that or anywhere close, you'll have done a lot of good.
First, just because you're well off doesn't require you to become a programmer or a hacker, the author is not claiming that. However if you were so inclined, you immediately have a leg up on others due to the circumstances you find yourself in, and the resources you have available to you. Denying that just seems stupid.
Second, the notion that becoming a good hacker requires social sacrifice is pathetic; misleading; stereotypical. Pick your poison. If you've made social sacrifices, don't blame computers.
On top of that, you still have the opportunity to make that sacrifice. If you have 12 siblings and live in the ghetto, or out in coal country, there's not much choice about who you have to interact with or the obligations you've gotta fulfill.
That's the whole point. If you grew up in a well off family who had access to a computer at home, or attended a school system that was able to get PCs, you were part of a fortunate group, as distinguished from people who did not have those opportunities available to them.
If you look, you'll probably find that people who've trained for pro-tennis since early grade school also tend to be well-off. Guess what? They really are fanatical tennis players; they aren't just "people that had the opportunity to be shuttled to expensive tennis lessons in their childhood".
You seem to be trying to engage me in an argument where we're both on the same side. That sounds boring. Let's instead engage with the article article that was posted.
Yes. I agree there is a class issue here. I agree so much that I think bad arguments about the class-based glass ceilings are harmful. Why even go to this place, about how committed 8 year olds really are? It's just silly.
The fact that you have more demonstrable experience may be a badge of honor. That you have had more time to hone your craft perhaps that's worth something.
But the fact that you've been programming for 10 years longer than someone else by itself doesn't mean anything, and it is otherwise irritating to hear people tout that as some sort of credential.
So perhaps your right that the author is not addressing the key point, which is that bragging that you've been using a computer longer than someone else is dumb. The author however is also pointing out that it's also pretentious.
And agreed, starting a fight for the sake of starting a fight is not the best use of either of our hours :)
In fact, I'll go further than that: the graph of payoff vs. practice over age is nonlinear, and the time you spend from 8 to (say) 14 is probably more valuable than the time you spend from (say) 18 to 22.
My friends growing up who coded were writing their own protected mode operating systems, building 3d engines, and modem file transfer protocols. Why? Because that is something that is easier to do when you're too fresh and ignorant to know what a pain building those things turns out to be.
Is the lack of access some 8 year olds have to this uniquely valuable development time a problem? Yes, friend, it is. That's a good argument. Which is exactly why arguments that boil down to the notion that it isn't valuable or a credential are bad arguments.
In fact, as computing moves forward, I believe the amount of insight gleaned in the early years of programming decreases. I think I would be farther along in my knowledge of programming and CS if I had started with assembly instead of BASIC. So I think being 'old sk00l' counts for quite a lot.
That is a very good observation that I hadn't noticed before. Of the scores of rich kids I knew who had computers in their rooms, I can name on one hand the number who now code or do anything close to coding as part of their jobs.