[abritinthebay]

There are occasionally brilliant coders at 17 who produce things of beauty. It's wonderful to behold. They are rare.

Sometimes the fire of youth produces fantastic ideas that change our world. Their initial efforts, though raw and non-optimal, show a beautiful gleam that - through effort by more seasoned developers - is polished into something beautiful. These are more common, but still rare.

Most 17 year old coders however produce well intentioned awfulness that is technically poor, non-optimal, has security holes, and if it handles edge cases at all does so poorly - and that's the good stuff.

The kids work is valuable but mostly to them - they're still learning.. usually still learning the basics too.

[orthecreedence]

I have been coding since I was 8. At 17, I had roughly 9 years experience. I built some really cool things with neural nets/genetic algorithms at 17, and they worked pretty well. However, I look back at the code I wrote and it almost brings me to tears how awful it is.

[abritinthebay]

Right, exactly - I've been coding in some form since I was 5 (in BASIC and PEEK and POKES) but the stuff I did as a teenager was fun exploration play.

It's important to do that! That's great for a programmer and it will likely have some cool ideas... and hell, maybe a product or something will come from it.

But the original post was just naive.