[exstudent2]

I don't think it's elitism, it's just that programming offers a unique opportunity to do this stuff from a very early age from home and the end results is some people end up being very good at it "early" in their career.

Unfortunately you couldn't start "computing the impulse response of a filter" when you were 12 but if you could, and you continued to practice it daily, you would be very capable compared to people who just started in university.

[sulam]

You're demonstrating the exact syndrome the story discusses: conflating the ability to write code "well" with all the other things one does as a software engineer. The article goes into more detail, but I do a fair number of things every day that do not involve typing in code on a keyboard.

Going further, I would argue that most people I know who've been programming since they were 12 weren't even writing very good code at 22 (or whenever they left college and entered the working world). It's vanishingly rare that people were writing flexible, maintainable code in their teens. It's much more common that they were coding to scratch an itch, and that their code only solves the pieces of the problem they cared about, and probably not very well.

Note: I've been programming since I was 12.

[fizbin]

This - that it's extremely rare to even be able to think the right things to produce maintainable code at that age - is why I've long thought that 12-15 is the right age to teach assembly language.

At that age, your code is going to be a mess no matter what tools you use, so you might as well have an excuse.

(Seriously: there's some brain development that doesn't happen until the close of puberty, and I believe that some of that is necessary for most people to plan and write maintainable code)