[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.