There’s never been a better time to be a 14-year-old developer
pandodaily.com
pandodaily.com
Computers were $200, and booted straight into a development environment, and came with sufficient printed documentation to actually learn that language.
At that time, the budget for low budget commercial games was 1-3 man-months of effort, very much within the reach of amateurs.
There also existed a good market for amateur productions -- things like the "disk of the month" clubs.
I was able to produce a game in a weekend, and sell it for one to two hundred dollars. If you factor in inflation, that's a pretty good wage for someone who's just learning and playing around.
The market for cheap, easy to make games dried up in the 90s. Even successful shareware games required a level of polish, effort and knowledge out of reach of most 14 year olds.
I'm really happy to see that 14 year olds can once again have experiences similar to mine. I hope it lasts, but it does appear that mobile development is shifting to the more standard "winner takes all" marketplace.
I did do some cool stuff in HyperTalk though.
Though, I think there is a pretty fair trade-off between time and understanding. I can pick up new skills (non-technical included) in less than half the time it would have taken me at 14. I've learned how to learn. Shipping an app at 14 is impressive not because they were able to do something difficult, but because they were able to do something difficult with much, much less life experience than is expected. This is to say that, although they have more time, it is, in general, more difficult for a young person to learn how to program. That is why I'm impressed when I see a 14 year old ship.
However actually shipping when you're that young is hard. It was not til I was 19 or 20 that I finally felt like I could write "real" software. The pieces just never fell into place before that despite dabbling for a decade or more as a child. Granted the web as it exists today makes it infinitely easier to learn today than it was when I was a kid, but I'm not going to use that as an excuse. Even with Google in all its glory I can't say unequivocally that I would be shipping code if I were 14 today.
You should. It's not just Google: Communities like HN, stackoverflow and reddit provide motivation and help when you need it. Now, with MOOCs being the latest trend in education, anyone can take university-level courses from world-renown on many topics for free.
> Even with Google in all its glory I can't say unequivocally that I would be shipping code if I were 14 today.
Are you sure? Why do you think age actually plays a role in a person's ability to ship code?
That doesn’t sound like a good idea...
Sure, at least now the standards are much more stable than in the 90s (I can't imagine trying to keep up with the rapid and constant platform lock in gotchas between netscape and ie...) but learning all that stuff takes a lot longer.
It is like how you can start a car easier today than you could in 1920. The car is much more complex, but the abstractions built on top of that have made it as easy as turning a key rather than having to rev the engine, crank it up, etc. But anyone trying to be an automechanic is expected to know the fine grained details of the modern combustion engine and all the quirks auto manufacturers use to make them more efficient and performant, or else they don't come off as "professional".
I feel the same way with any development role. It doesn't feel professional if I don't know the whole stack behind it. And the stack, like the car, has only gotten taller. Average Joe can pick up Drupal or jquery + bootstrap + rails and crank out a pretty neat web app, but the second their tools don't cover some use case and they are forced to look at things like the TCP stack, packet headers, http headers, etc, and they look lost, they also look bad at what they are doing.
Computers in schools aren't used for programming anymore. It went the way of vocational programs since teachers are not hired to teach it specifically and a generalist cannot. Computers are web browsers, readers, and run specific education software.
There is a need for that Sinclair / Commodore price and it has been replaced with iPods and smart phones.
I was born in the mid-sixties and got in touch with software programming at an early age. It became my hobby, along with the field of electronics. I was very keen to get to know exactly how things worked and what was happening, even up to the level of the silicon. In those days I spent more time reading datasheets and computer manuals than I did reading comics.
During my whole career in secondary school (VWO-B) I have been able to follow the development of the microcomputer. As far as that goes, I grew up in a very interesting era. It was the period in which the 'computing power' migrated from the centralized mainframes to various decentralized systems.
Due to my innate interest I became acquainted with all sorts of programming languages and fields of application for computers; I absorbed a lot of knowledge regarding the subjects that interested me the most. At the time, the topics were C, data communication, audiovisual applications, and relational databases, first on C/PM and later on MSDOS. Some years later, C++, Unix, and Windows were added. And after a while I also acquired knowledge of the Internet, the WWW, and programming languages such as Java, Java script, PHP, and Python.
When I was twenty years old I managed to get a job as a software developer, and since this line of work has never ceased to interest me I am currently still active as a developer.