Do all great programmers start young?

I was recently hearing one of the Stackoverflow podcasts, where Jeff and Joel were interviewing Steve Yegge from Google. Jeff mentioned how he started programming at the age of around 13, and how the developers he has the most affinity with are also those who started at around 13, and were largely self-taught. Steve agreed with him (being one of those who started young), and insisted that the best developers are those who start young and are self-taught. And I have to agree! Well I would, since I started at 13 too.

I remember my parents bought us a Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, when we couldn’t find any Sinclair Spectrums (I think they were called Timex in the US) in stock anywhere. It was Christmas 1981, and I was 12 going on 13. The first thing I did when we got the computer home, was to type out one of those game listings you’d find in video game magazines. I’d actually bought the magazine before the computer. After spending a few hours typing it in (my typing skills were non existent then!), I typed in run, and waited. It kind of worked, but the score at the top right hand corner of the screen was not working. Disaster! I must have typed something in wrong. So I roped in my little brother to read me line by line, while I checked for any typos. After another few hours, we finally concluded, that we had typed it in correctly. I don’t know what drove me, but I had to fix it. It was a graphical score, with each digit independent of the others. So with every increase in score, you’d increment the units column, until it were at 9, in which case, you’d set it back to 0, and increment the tens column, and so on and so forth. Seems trivial now, but it took me a few days to figure out TI-BASIC, and fix it. But boy what elation when I ran it, and it finally worked. The subsequent month’s magazine printed the bug-fix, but I had fixed it on my own. I was officially a programmer. Luckily due to a hardware quirk, while my friends played fast machine code games on their Commodore 64s and Spectrums, the TI99/4A had some drab Basic and Extended Basic games available or wildly expensive (well to a 12 year old they were)cartridges. So if you had a TI99/4A, you either learnt to program, or you made friends with the neighbours and their Commodore! I started writing games, and even advertised and sold a few tapes. (storage was on plain old audio tapes) …and so began the love affair with computers.

So when did you start programming?