My first program was written in Dartmouth
Basic. The original version of Basic. In college, for the first 2 years I used punched cards. Then after college I programmed a jet fighter. Then realtime embedded avioinics stuff. I got tired of working with custom hardware which was challenging distinguishing between hardware and software bugs. After 20 years of Windows programming, I re-invented myself as a HTML, CSS, CoffeeScript, Javascript, LUA, PHP, Angular, Ember and iOS developer.
Coding as a child often makes you a better junior developer. It very rarely makes you anything but a junior developer, your first few years full time at it.
This is very true. I had my first full time internship last summer and although I wouldn't say I was unprepared, it opened my eyes to all the things I don't know. Code reviews take some getting used to when you're coming from a purely academic world. From reading hacker news I knew there would be blindspots in my education. It felt good filling in some of the blanks.
