How young are the coders...

[David Bovill]

On 7 Dec 2005, at 11:09, Heather Nagey wrote:

> Interesting info there. A couple of things are possibly skewing  
> perceptions of the average age of the community - youngsters likely  
> can't afford to go to conferences so you probably wouldn't see them  
> there, and I wonder how many of them have the dedication to wade  
> through and participate in this list?
>
> I know for a fact we have some younger coders, one I know of is 15,  
> so that takes your crown Andre :)
>
> This isn't to say we don't want more. We always want more, of any  
> age, we are not ageist or sexist. I was teaching my 9 year old  
> daughter to code in Rev on the train recently - she was intrigued  
> with the possibility of making the CEO into a flying pig that  
> circled the window (I was testing Arcade Engine at the time).

Yeah - Rev shines at doing this, and is a great platform for  
educationalists.

However though there are always bright young exceptions, the danger  
of the current strategy is that we do not attract and will tend to  
loose the best of the 18-25 year olds. It is my experience that  
despite the initial attraction, these young(ish) devlopers are  
motivated (via various pressures) to move on to "more serious" (read  
open source) coding platforms - this is where they gain there "geek  
points".

Rev is great for learning and teaching, it is great for rapidly  
deploying cross platform commercial solutions for small businesses.  
But it also has a firm place in rapidly developing, testing and  
deploying open source projects that are cool - largely because of the  
ease of creating rich cross platform clients that can put AJAX style  
interfaces to shame, also because of the rich media support. For that  
we need to attract the best young designers and keep / rebuild the  
bridge to those open source coders on Linux that are moving on to the  
stage of trying to get their usability and design up to commercial  
grade standards.