programming - early starters

Something that has always annoyed me is how some people believe they're the best programmers in the world and everyone else sucks since they have been programming in C since they were 9 or some other shit like that. Some of us are not as fortunate to have the resources and people around us to set us up with stuff like that to learn from such a young age.

I've been programming since I was about 15, starting out in Java because that's what my school offered. And even that is better than a lot of other people get, since I had both an Honors and AP Comp Sci, and the teacher was great with a good curriculum so our whole class ended up getting 5's (i think there was just one 4). The class was in Java, sure, but it was a good introduction to programming, and because of it I'm getting a lot more out of my C courses now in College.

Even still, I've met some people who have been programming since they were 9 or 13 or whatever, in C. It's like "I wrote the ANSI C compiler when I was 9 in ANSI C". It pisses me off to no end. I can still write good code in the languages I know, I should still be smart enough to be able to learn programming and be a good programmer in my life. Just because I haven't been programming since I was 2 doesn't mean I'm screwed.

The problem is, I still tend to measure myself against these people and I feel like I'm playing catch-up all the time, and it makes me worry/stressed. Any thoughts on how to deal with this kind of crap?

>>35

No, I didn't. I'd been working around computers and actually using them since I was like, 2 or 3, and mostly just used it for the internet and to search around the file structure to play games and stuff like that. I say MS-DOS since this was around the days where there really was no GUI for Windows, and I was stuck in the black screen with text most of the time sans playing games and writing stuff for school or w/e.

To be honest? No, I never fucked around with BASIC at all. I don't want to sound like an a-hole or anything, but really, at that time, I didn't give a shit about programming or any other serious "computer hobbyist" stuff. I had other stuff going on in my life, like friends and school and sports and what have you, stuff that normal kids do.

I didn't really become as much of a shut-in and learning about all this cool stuff I could do with a computer until I reached high school and found out how much most of humanity sucks. It's weird now though, since my prior skills mean that I'm very good at interacting with people socially (regardless of whether they're a person I dislike or not), yet I also love reading, writing, and learning. I guess that's a positive in this world, considering how many programmers you hear about fitting into the ``cliche" (i.e. hermits who might be smart but can't deal with people, never had a girlfriend, etc etc)

Also, as much as a find C fascinating, I really don't think I could stand programming in it for the rest of my life (especially since it seems to be being used less and less these days outside of school, considering the current and increasing power of hardware). Java sucks too, don't get me wrong, but I really really enjoy languages like Python (especially considering the interpreter is extensible by C) and other languages where you can get things to work quickly but still function well. I love learning C in college and I hope it will teach me a lot so that when I graduate I'll be a better programmer because of it no matter what I program in, but the development time and all the things that can go wrong for just a little more speed/less memory usage are a killer.

I hope you guys don't hold that against me :P (hey, at least I'm not in a Java school, amirite? ;)