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Comment by tupac_speedrap | Hacker News Reader

How is not touching a programming language until college a bad thing? Some people just want to make a living out of software engineering and then go home and they aren't sweating over Web 4.0 or whatever we are on now.

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There are exceptions to the rule. I know good engineers who started quite late in life.

But in general, I don't see a deluge of kids eager to become developers. Still seems very niche just like it always has been.

The other thing that gets missed is people who start young are so interested in computing they have lots of adjacent knowledge.

I know good engineers who started quite late in life.

My experience matches yours exactly. Almost all of the good engineers that started late in life in my experience are just plain extremely smart and would excel at anything they did.

One friend that comes to mind wrote his PhD thesis in chemical engineering and then switched to being a software engineer. He is too motivated and too smart to fail at it even though he doesn't have what I consider that intrinsic spark that led him pursue computers at an early age.

Yeah: the vast majority of software engineering work is far from rocket science, and any reasonably intelligent (upper 50%? upper 25%? upper 10%?) person can do it.

To me the real test is mentality. The spark. You have to enjoy it enough to do it for 2,000+ hours a year. That seems rare.

18 is awfully old to start learning something for the first time. Imagine saying the same thing about math, reading, or history. It's harder to pick things up when you're older, and it leaves fewer people capable of it. See also: learning human languages.

This is the saddest thing I've read on this website. I hope for your own sake you allow yourself to learn new things in the future.

It's not about what you're allowed to do, it's about what professionals in a field need to do to get to the top.

I've been programming since I was 8. I've been drawing since I was 29. I will probably never reach the same percentile of drawing ability that I have with programming ability. That's okay for me because I enjoy it anyway, but from the perspective of training people to do their best work, starting younger can lead to higher ability.

There's a huge gap between what you said, which I think is totally reasonable, and saying "18 is awfully old to learn something new". Of course learning something when you're younger likely makes you better at it compared to starting when you're older, but an 18 year old is statistically not even through 1/3 of their life.

Not to even consider the amount of people who get into their trade at such a young age. I'll be honestly surprised if they make up any significant amount of the population, and I'm saying this as someone in that boat.

people don’t generally tend to feel this way about training to work in medicine or hvac or law. or even language, really. obviously children learn how to use language, but training for a professional job as a teacher or a translator (or whatever) doesn’t start at age 8.

Kids learn how to read, write, and speak at least one language. Kids who learn two or more presumably turn into better translators. Potential lawyers have access to debate clubs and are trained in public speaking. I know one HVAC technician, and he's been working on cars and bikes with his dad since early childhood. Even doctors get taught biology.

I pretty firmly believe nearly anyone can learn to contribute in any area given enough time, but there's a lot of time between 0 and 18, and it's prime learning time when brain plasticity is high and responsibilities are low.

Is it really that controversial to say childhood shapes a kid's future?

No, the controversial statement in question was the claim that "18 is awfully old to start learning something for the first time" wrt programming.

It's late only if you want to become a top programmer. Top programmers are like top pianists, they start early and are very motivated.

I started at around 10, but there are plenty of programmers I look up to that didn’t. It’s an indication of intrinsic motivation and genuine interest, but there are plenty of people who find that much later.

Even today, 25 years later I feel like I learn things more effectively than when I was a kid. Certain types of skills benefit from experience and networked thought. Time per day/week is a much more limiting factor though.

it absolutely isn't in the context.

you start to learn maths in kindergarten. you don't start to program computers there, usually. there are very good reasons not to do that (screen time!), but it will make learning to program easier later in life.

Learning to program early makes later programming easier is an uncontroversial, anodyne statement. Saying that 18 is too late to start learning is, because that is discounting everyone who learns at that age or later.

I'd argue learning programming is a different skill compared to memorising laws or biology, it's math more than anything else (especially logic, set theory).

Lawyers and doctors basically need to memorise facts, apply rules and make deductions. Developers need to do that + math, hence why starting early helps you out, exactly like kids who did math or chess early on are better than their peers who started later.

Of course we try new things. The things you learn as a child get internalized very differently than the things you learn as an adult though.

This is absolutely false. I became fluent in Japanese in my 30s. Learned guitar in my late 20s. This is so wrong. You can continue learning until you are dead.

(edit: I started learning Japanese at 18. I'd say) I became fluent in Japanese in my late 20s. I'm close to 44. My wife is Japanese. I live in Japan. Japanese middle-schoolers (edit: ok, maybe high-schoolers) are more fluent than I am.

GP is not saying you can't learn. GP is saying you're unlikely to be more skilled than those who started earlier. Also, past a certain age, there's a more limited amount of time you can dedicate to learning new stuff.

I think the time factor is likely the most dominant when it comes to learning new things. The beauty of being a young learner is having much more time to do so due to having less responsibilities.

Of course, but you are not likely to speak like a Japanese person - maybe you will, after practicing for a lot of time and assuming your native language had matching sounds to Japanese (I don't know about Japanese but there are some guttural sounds in Greek you won't be able to learn as an adult unless you've been exposed to them as a child). Meanwhile a newborn would learn to speak like a native Japanese speaker in 3-5 years.

> I became fluent in Japanese in my 30s.

Me too, but I will never reach close to native level of proficiency. It's fun but just that.

I started learning to program in college. I am an EE, so maybe CS is a bit different. But I remember how intimidating it was to be in a my first programming class with the kids that already knew "everything". So, I bought a C++ book and worked through it cover to cover. Honestly, I had caught up with most the kids that already knew how to program after a couple of semesters or so and helped a bunch of them with our programming lab. I am sure there are some exceptional prodigies that are way better than I am, but it is quite impressive what one can learn even at an older age if one puts time and effort in.

Most professions are learned and mastered after people finish high school, so that's clearly not true.

To add, some professions even require a certain age or previous, (unrelated) trade, like paramedics. They don’t teach teenagers to do certain jobs.

18 or any age is alright. In college we had a class coded IS100, which stands for "Information Systems 100". It was so basic that unlike the other 1st year courses that were coded 101, this one was coded with 100. In this class people will be learning how to operate a mouse, close a computer, navigate to a website etc.

Extremely basic stuff that was completely new to kids that grew up in a poor family that couldn't afford buy them a computer. This is in a country where college education is free or close to free, you just need to score high to get into a college and as a result many smart students who later become engineers learned using a computer there.

Hocam?

One can learn a human language later in life, you just need to have a reason to do it. Kids are better at language acquisition because they have strong desire to communicate with people in their environment. There is no magical LAD that makes it easier for children, they are just extremely motivated.

Adults can be motivated also, but the situations for such motivations necessarily decrease as they are able to do what they want without learning new things. They aren’t less capable of learning, just less motivated to learn. That is easy enough to fix (extreme interest is a good motivator, for example).

That's just incorrect. Children have increased neuroplasticity and will always outperform an adult in terms of language learning - not to mention you lose the ability to learn to make certain sounds after a certain age.

Critical period hypothesis is somewhat debated in linguistics. Children and Adults just learn differently. Children have far less inhibitions and more time. The second part of your comment sounds like pseudoscience. I learned German in my late 20s and speak to native speakers every day, where I live bilingual is the norm and a whole lot of people acquire second, third or forth languages as adults.

I think about the first “generation” of computer programmers, many of whom (e.g. Knuth, Richie) wrote software we still use today. At best you could say that it lends itself to a different set of skills. For example, scholars of a second language may know a lot more about its grammar and linguistics than even native professional writers. The native writer might never be able to translate their own work well after learning to speak a second language. There’s probably benefits to growing up “native” in programming, but there’s plenty of examples of people starting later and doing well.

I do know of too many people who have changed careers into programming to write off the likelihood of learning it after 18.

How is not touching a programming language until college a bad thing?

I am the OP you're asking this of and I don't think first touching a programming language in college is a bad thing. And I also don't subscribe to the belief that learning has to become more difficult as you age.

What I was doing however was responding to the statement, "I think it ends with everyone becoming a developer". The reality is that almost all people have no interest in becoming a software developer. Most software developers have no idea this is true, but it is. This doesn't make most people's lives less valid or make them "dumber" or anything else pejorative - they're just different.

On the one hand you have people like me who stared fascinated watching my 5th grade teacher program a VIC-20 in Commodore BASIC that led my parents to invest a giant sum of money into buying a Commodore 64 for Christmas when I was 10. To give me a 300 baud modem when I was 13. I couldn't afford to buy computer books in the mall bookstores so I would go to a "book warehouse" near me as often as I could and I tell you I would literally get butterflies in my stomach as I approached the computer book section. I wrote my own BBS program at 14. In 1988 I read the Waite Group's Turbo-C Bible cover to cover repeatedly.

There are people out there who get just as excited about and have as much proficiency with bass guitars. I have a good friend that is like that. I respect his ability and interests as much as I hope people respect mine.

It is not bad for the individual (one can become a decent programmer without playing around with programming in childhood), but it is bad for society and our education system in general. Programming early can add a lot of color and value to a child’s development.

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