Grumpy Old Man?
I ran across this Reuters article about a nine year old kid who’s writing iPhone apps. They call him a “whiz-kid” in the headline.
While most children his age sketch on paper with crayons, nine-year old Lim Ding Wen from Singapore, has a very different canvas — his iPhone.
While I applaud his efforts, talent, and ability to somehow get the attention of the mainstream press, I and my friends where writing programs at age 9, too - and that was 20 years ago when it wasn’t cool. Maybe I’m just getting old and grumpy, but I always feel a bit slighted by mainstream articles that lionize a kid for doing the same things I had done at his/her age many years earlier - but was ridiculed or ignored at the time. (Get off my lawn!)
Twenty years ago, my canvas was either an Apple-II clone or the Atari 800. I can’t really remember the timeframes accurately enough to know which I was using in 1989 - but it was one of those two. I wasn’t just playing games (although I did my share of that). I was programming and learning from the few simplistic books on the subject that I could find at the city library. There wasn’t an Internet to use for reference and my parents had no idea how any of it worked. I was on my own. And yet somehow I learned a lot and made things I thought were cool at the time. Every now and then I miss those days when a project could be done just for the sake of it and it didn’t have to live up to prior expectation or anyone else’s opinion. It’s just a shame I couldn’t manage to get international press for my graphical dungeon adventure game for the Apple-II.