There’s never been a better time to be a 14-year-old developer

The mid-late 80's were also a good time to be a 14-year-old developer.<p>Computers were $200, and booted straight into a development environment, and came with sufficient printed documentation to actually learn that language.<p>At that time, the budget for low budget commercial games was 1-3 man-months of effort, very much within the reach of amateurs.<p>There also existed a good market for amateur productions -- things like the "disk of the month" clubs.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

The reason it's great to be a young developer is all the press it garners. Even a mediocre game will earn a top spot on HN if it's programmed by a young person.

Being a good developer is largely about practice. Who has more time to practice than a 14 year old armed with an entire summer vacation of free time and no worries about having to pay bills? I'm more impressed when a 35 year old with a family is able to learn to be a developer.

<i>"[14 yr old Rubin] was recently hired to develop a new website for the American Journal of Psychiatry (in part because it’s edited by his uncle)."</i><p>That doesn’t sound like a good idea...

As someone still learning a lot about development (I would really like to meet someone who isn't...), I can't help but be somewhat jealous of the upstart devs in the 80s and 90s who just had terminals, text editors, make and ANSI C. The raw knowledge base required to establish a base for oneself is tremendous now. And the paradigms of programming have only become more and more complex, since everything needs networking, multicore, heterogeneous computing, and security is harder than ever.

I think the statement "There's never been a better time to be a 14-year old developer" is always true – things keep getting better.

On the flip side, there's never been a more terrible time to be a 54-year-old developer.

is this still a big deal today? unlike a few years ago, computers are easily accessible today, information and lessons on the internet are waiting to be discovered... I simply don't think age matters at all in this field..

I disagree with the first paragraph; isn't it more difficult now than it was a couple of years ago to get a successful iOS app store hit? with the huge amount of competition and number of quality free game downloads now.

Hate to be a Debbie downer, but I have a hard time seeing the economics of this working out for the publisher although I'm sure it's a great experience for the kids. Most of these apps probably won't break even so they will need to have a mega hit to make it work, which seems unlikely given the competition of professionally made large budget (comparatively) games and extremely talented and dedicated indie developers.

I have a feeling a very high percentage of programmers on HN themselves started when they were 13-15 years old.

It's never been easier to be a young developer either.