So you came back to argue with what you basically sum up as a troll?
How a story makes you feel is probably the most important part of it. And I agree with Max: I feel disconnected from the person who says they were hacking awesome crap back when they were 16. I feel even more so because I almost had that opportunity - I learned Basic on my uncle's old C64 when I was 8! I wanted compilers so bad, I read C++ Windows API books from the library without any idea what the hell they meant, but nobody was there to guide me. I gave up. I know it's a bad way of looking at it, but I felt kind of cheated by the universe.
And implying that you need to be that kind of person - who has been hacking since their teens - to succeed, yeah, that makes me feel like I can't do it. I mean Jacques, come on. From that story it seems you a computing god at 17. And my 17-year-old parallel, writing some dumb Java apps, pales in comparison.
Agreed. I mean, here's the description of his first attempt at helping somebody with a computing problem:
I looked at their code for a bit, saw that it was hopelessly inefficient and hand-assembled a much faster version using a look-up table and a bit mask instead of a bunch of math to figure out where in memory to dump the data from the converter.
I feel exactly the same way as parent and grandparent when I read stories like this.
How a story makes you feel is probably the most important part of it. And I agree with Max: I feel disconnected from the person who says they were hacking awesome crap back when they were 16. I feel even more so because I almost had that opportunity - I learned Basic on my uncle's old C64 when I was 8! I wanted compilers so bad, I read C++ Windows API books from the library without any idea what the hell they meant, but nobody was there to guide me. I gave up. I know it's a bad way of looking at it, but I felt kind of cheated by the universe.
And implying that you need to be that kind of person - who has been hacking since their teens - to succeed, yeah, that makes me feel like I can't do it. I mean Jacques, come on. From that story it seems you a computing god at 17. And my 17-year-old parallel, writing some dumb Java apps, pales in comparison.