Computer Science Teacher - Thoughts and Information from Alfred Thompson

Could we see screenshots?

this reminds me of a kind in grade 8 that programmed an application to change the bootup screen in Windows 98

Just what the world needs: another monopolist!

That's amazing. I just looked at the screenshots. It looks better than IE7!

"had a lot of features I'd never thought about."

That's exactly why firefox is a better browser than IE, it gives not just 12 year old's the option to build new features, but it gives it to anyone, and not just for their own downloadable package, but for all the firefox browsers allready installed.

BTW, 99% of the features listed in the screenshots are either firefox rips, opera rips, or allready available trough addon extentions for either browser.

Sweet.. really good looking, looks REALLY professional if you ask me. I'm just a bit in doubt that this kid wrote all of this himself... I mean.. :| damn!? Even the "graphics" and menu's and other little screen thingies are done so well... I'm not really convinced this kid did it all by himself... or maybe I'm just jealous :)

Sounds very much like Bill Gates indeed!

I'm not saying that this browser will revolutionize the world, or even his middle school class, but I wasn't doing that at age 9 or 12! What were you doing?

I say, more power too him. He has a better start than I did.

so, is microsoft going to rip him off and not pay him?!

Folks, it doesn't really matter if the browser is Teh Awesome!@#$! Or that he used the .NET drag&drop to build it. Or even if he got help from Internet forums. The guy is 13.

What matters is that he could get something to work, he knows what the tools are and how to make them Do Stuff, and that he understand enough about how a sufficiently complex program could work that he can talk about it intelligently.

At 13, that is huge. If he keeps at it, he'll be stellar.

@ lame

I think you missed the point. No, he didn't code the browser from "scratch", but the point is that he added interesting and non-trivial functionality to a browser and C# and it's wealth of classes made it relatively simple to create it. I probably wouldn't code a compiler in C#, but it's a complete language and such an exercise is not out of the realm of possibilities. Don't be such a language snob.

I really don't like coding in Visual Basic, but it's easy access to the masses allowed a whole lot of people who would never consider programming to write really interesting applications. Not the best designed or the most efficient algorithms, but interesting and functional.

This is about as good as being about to hook up a stereo. Sure he ripped off the front and make some new knobs for it, but "the hard part" ie the part that makes music the part that makes it a STEREO was already built by someone else. The article should say 12 year old plays with Photoshop.

kills me how hes using windows vista.

I was programming in BASIC when I was in 6th grade with a toy computer, I graduated on to VB and C merely from the desire to create my own programs.  By 15 I had a popular MUD online with a decent sized player base.  At 20, I haven't written more than a few lines of code in over a year.  I think it is burn out, this kid is over exherting himself if he actually did it all solo.

Interesting, I found the interface is similar to another browser called TheWorld browser.

Very impressive!!

Every here of those kids who are 3 years old and can read entire kids books?  They wow all the parents and family.  Then they realize that child has somehow memorized the words.  Kids can memorize a lot.  Comprehend a read at that age, not so much.  

I seem to recall that during my visual basic programming course in high school, there was a wizard that you could use to create a web browser. I know this because every time the class was boring and I wanted to surf the web, I would just "code" a web browser and surf away. Quite essential when they had locked us out of launching web browsers on our own.

satguy..everyone believes he did this... He created a browser in C# using the IE browser engine... end of story.

Kinda neat, but also trivial in terms of code.

And about his age.  It's cool, but it's not unique.  I was programming games in TI-basic at 7...and I'm not the only one.  Of course, most of the people writing games at 7 probably wrote better games than I did, but hey, I'm a slow learner

Daje rispondi!

So, is it standards compliant?

What's the 24bit PNG Transparency rendering like? Better than ie?

Tutta colpa del pipparolo mancato.

To all the people who "claim" they did/could have done this back in the day, without internet, without facny editors, through 10 feet of snow uphill...

Most likely you "never" did or could and would probably have a difficult/long time to do it right now.  Where are your pictures, presentations, actual program?  You don't have any now and you won't anytime soon.  

I guess it just burns you to see a 12 year old actually take advantage of stuff you never did and do more with it.

yeah, great. can i go to sleep now?

It reminds of myself at this age, I was coding a lot of things (among those, a web browser, that's what it's making me smile), and experimenting with graphic design softwares...

I trust that this kid has been able to do it by himself, but I think that he borrowed code from forums and other sources (which is normal ! even professional coders do and should do that sometimes).

By the way, the internet explorer control helped him a lot I think.

Anyway, congrats to this kid.

ps: I'm 21 years old, so I'm not that old (before you start saying that web browsers didn't exist when I was a teenager ;)).

It's cool that programming languages become simpler so that it doesn't require you to be an aging geek to be able to code a simple application

It's cool that a kid enjoys and has fun coding at such a young age

But he should rather spend more time having fun with his friends and doing more social stuff than coding. I mean he's freaking 12. Do you remember much about when you were 12?

Dude... I'm 12. That's the only reason I clicked on this Digg link. My limits are XHTML and minimal CSS. Gratz to the guy who did this. Still think he's a show-off for sticking it on a USB and actually taking it to MS...

I'm too busy any way. Not that I couldn't do this if a few lines of ActiveX were dropped into a file. Still, nice one little kid. You do us all proud.

Hey kid, don't let any of these guys bring you down.  Everyone starts somewhere. Just ensure that if this browser is to be a vista browser that it includes all the new vista dialogs and vista layout standards and surely that it supports xbap's.

I started programming at 3 and my first program was Windows1.0

yes, Bill stole it from me, bastard!

Its nice someone does something like that, but what most people say: its just putting objects together and linking them in a cute way.

I dont think he had to do a lot of actual coding.

I once made a website with C# (visual webdeveloper) and its was all done with wizards...

If he actually coded it all then its a different story.

OK, to all the people that are saying how easy it is in C# please note that this kid was able understand C# and .NET enough to write this. I'm sure given the opportunity when we were all young we could have accomplished this as well. The fact that someone his age has the access to tools and information to do this bodes well and bad for our futures. Well that more people will be able to write their own custom tools and understand how computers work in the future. Bad that it potentially puts us out of a job.

To his credit it looks like he was rather thurough in creating an entire browser interface around the "Drag and Drop" controls.

I remember being that age and writing choose your own adventure games on an Apple IIe. Then onto HS where I wrote applications on my lovely TI-86 and worked on the web. It wasn't until after HS I was building GUI interfaces. Kudos to this kid and Kudos to MS for finally giving people a way to develop for Windows without having to pay an arm and a leg. I know *nix has had it all this time.. but starting C/C++ in a *nix environment would be a bit too hard at 12.

Those icons aren't his, I've seen some of them before in an old Maxthon theme

@Ty

I take it you're replying to me. Well unless he's a liar, what I don't think he is, he did start programming at 5. What does it mean? Full understanding of computer programming? Nope. Just writing small console apps, like asking your name, a calculator, etc. I did so at 7 in turbo pascal so I'm sure that starting at 5 isn't that unusual.

I didn't program much at that age, but I did sometimes with my (8-years older) brother. The friend I know was taught by his father. What's exceptional? How is it "tooting my horns"? These are just facts.

I really came back to computing when I had my first PC at home in 97. Previously, I had been using some at my father's work and at school, but also Macs, Atari ST and SunOS workstations.

There are a LOT of code/script kiddies out there, just like there were a lot back when I was one. I programmed in Delphi using components/libraries I didn't fully understand but I did tons of (now lost) programs; I still remember some of them:  trojan horses servers + clients (like back orifice), a portscanner/client which would try all known trojan horses at the time and try to reboot the targeted computer, a collection of mini-games that we played with pencil/paper in class, IRC bots, 3rd party Ultima Online programs (a bit like UO Stratics' Xena's ones), and so on. I also did a ton of "test" applications to learn GUI design, and my (very lame) web browser based on IE 3.2 was one of them. Most of this happened in 97/98, when I also started learning PHP 2/FI and Perl.

Was this a feat? Nope it wasn't.

Having been IRC admin for 5 years in the past, I have "met" a lot of kids who were doing just like me; they were starting with PHP and mIRC scripts, then VB crap and finally to C/C++. I know a lot of those kids. I know a 17 years old who ports device drivers to NetBSD. And I know him since he was 13 and a Windows script kiddie, doing websites in PHP and lame apps in VC++.

Now, I don't have anything to prove. I'm doing a Master of Computer Science and soon be a PhD candidate. Compared to my comrades, I never had any problem with learning new languages in a few days, and it is because of my early start with computers and programming languages.

Anyway, that's not my point (it was made before by someone else). When I started programming on Windows in 97, I already knew that there was something called GNU/Linux. It ran on my brother's computer (who was not living at home anymore). I didn't know what it was precisely, but I knew it was meant to be a Windows replacement. Because of the state of Linux at the time, and because I started playing Ultima Online more than programming ;), I only starting using GNU/Linux as a development platform (not yet as a desktop) in 2000 (and this is the only reason I would thank EA/OSI to issue the dreadful UO:R patch...), because PHP3 would crash when using POST on Windows.

Now, the state of GNU/Linux is completely different. It is mature enough for kids to start with it. This browser should be using the Gecko engine and run GNU/Linux. Sources should be available for the world to see. That's my point.

Kudos to the kid, even if it was alot of drag and drop work, i haven't seen one of you "I was programming Some-old-language when I was 10" people show us any of those programs you wrote back then. This kid has guts to show off what he's done, even if it is a lite copy of IE 7. By the time he's my age (34), he'll probably have written a new OS kernel or taken an active role in some new technology that has changed the way computers are used.... Don't diss the kid, at least he's got a good start somewhere

looks like he just used firefox and changed it up a bit. i mean firefox is opensource.

Giving him a bit too much credit...I respect that he put in the effort to do what he did, BUT 20k lines for a re-implementation of the IE API is way too much, I doubt he's got anything efficient IF he wrote it himself and didn't just drag and drop the parts in to be auto-coded by an IDE.  I smell bologna.

i guess the kid will be much better if he gave up on M$ stuff. he will become a better programmer. languages like VB creates really bad programmers.

If those of you who are smashing this kid want to be taken seriously, learn to spell first. I've seen more misspelled words in the last 5 minutes reading this than I have in the past week. Let's not rip on someone's language of choice until you can use yours correctly!

It's just a Form with some ActiveX controls on it. Not much different from painting a basic picture in Photoshop... The real difference would be if he wrote his own parser that reliably could handle at least one markup spec. All of the programming work that really matters was already done by the guys who wrote the components.

He is young yes... And he clearly finds programming interesting, I'm sure he will become a good programmer.

If he does not fall in the trap, start getting used to drag/drop programming, and never evolves.

Just take a look at his webpage... hosted on office Live, looks like a microsoft page, and does not work in Opera.

Lets see what he can do when he switches to OS X full time.

this kid probably used a custom browser control and just 'modified it'. At 12 I was programming in BASIC on DOS (early 90s), but I mean it's not that big a deal - plus I doubt he created the images (looks like a webbrowser control to me - like those kids that use vb + ie control and think they're programmers).

Wow. Incredible that the majority of the replies here are "so what, he just did bla bla bla" instead of "wow, cool stuff. what a nice idea. i have some tips, though ..." - and from people over 10 years older than him. Give him a break, give him a hand and stop booing. At least he's trying, improving and getting better than the rest of us while we discuss. (HE didn't say he made this from scratch - he just set out to fulfill some ideas, with the tools available for him.)

All of the graphics can be found on the following sites:

www.iconshock.com

www.iconfish.com

www.iconexperience.com

I can't waste my time trying to track them all down, but I have a large assortment of licensed icon sets from these companies that have the exact same icons in them.

Unfortunately, at prices of $200+ per set (or even the "low cost" of buying them in large packages) they are still more than a 12 year old could probably afford.

AKA, BitTorrent and Newsgroups are his friend. Hopefully, 12 year olds can't be sued.

when i was 12 id come home eager to rub one out after school. after rubbing one out daily for several years i decided to start programming. who cares what every else did. this article is about the fact the kid was able to use .net to efficiently make a program that works. and if u dont like ms or .net why are you on the msdn site? go make some popcorn while u wait for your kernel to boot. no one makes perfect software or programs. not at first release anyway.

It seems this kid as bruised a few egos.

BTW, I started coding when I was just 2 months old in pure binary. Heres my first ever program:

01001001001000000110000101101101001000000110000100100000011001100111010101100011011010110110100101101110011001110010000001101100001100110011001101110100001000000110001101101111011001000110010101110010

No big suprises here.. at 13, I was teaching a programming class at my middle school (using BASIC) as an after school activity. At 14 I had already sold 100 copies of a program that converted DOS batch files to C code so they could be compiled into executables (downloaded of of AOL's shareware base)

We are not jealous or saying that the 13 year old could not do this. We are expressing the opinion that he author obviously thinks this is a huge accomplishment when really it is a simple coding project. At this time given the tools and the code generation abilities of new tools (VS.NET), projects like this are not out of scope for a new programmer.  Most of the options simply modifying object parameters and refreshing the gui.

Good job but nothing news worthy.

I wish this kid the best of luck in the future,  I think he deserves a  "Congratulations" For his hard work.  It looks very very professional, and that By The time he is 20 he should have some great work ahead of him  

Good Luck, Joe

I started programming when I was 8 (on ZX81 and Thomson computers).

At that time, there was a huge interest in coding for your people. There was a lot of magazines full of "listings", ie. source code that you had to copy in order to run an application. People copied these listings, then they improved the code and they quickly learned how to code;

And since 8-bit computers had limited resources, a lot of people familiar with BASIC quickly learned assembly language, in order to get faster code and to use tricks that weren't accessible in pure BASIC.

PEEK, POKE, CALL...

Later, with Atari and C64, there was a real scene, both for creating demos and for cracking software. 12-years old programmers, crackers, music makers and gfx designers were common. We did that because there was a competition. It was fun to discover new tricks, to get faster code than other coders, to crack software before other crews, and to make wonderful graphics out of 16 colors.

20000 lines of code is really not a lot, especially on operating systems that don't require a full reboot everytime there's a bug in the code, like OS-less assembly programming did.

I'm actually shocked to read that it looks like an exceptionnal thing that a 12-years old guy wrote 20000 lines of code.

Or actually, what it means is that nowadays, young people have absolutely no interest in programming. And this is sad.

Screw all u jealous bastards...

I say CONGRATS to him!! :)

if this kid goes to college he will finally get a chance to act 12

Hey give the boy a break, he made a beautifull GUI. Which is very important because linux is fast and "efficient", but also very ugly and Nerdisch.

I started programming at the age of 6, on my c64, by 12 I had managed to write a primitive ray-tracer in AMOS.