Why is it the top 10? Their profiles seem really standard for developers aged 19. Who didn't start playing around with PHP and JavaScript at age 14?

Anyone over 30 :)

Not everyone had access to the resources at 14 (Internet, computer).

Are those being able to create websites and use fancy web frameworks nowadays considered top developers?

Isn't it interesting there's only one mention to C#, one to Java and one to Windows?

And basically all of them listed PHP.

I guess you need to be a little older to truly form a deep hatred for PHP.

PHP is OK for small, short-lived web applications (which is, sometimes, exactly what you need). It's only when the small things outlive their original purpose age get large and complicated that maintenance becomes a nearly impossible job of fixing one thing without two others and when you really start regretting the choice of PHP.

Not that there is no nice, maintainable PHP code out there. It's just that the overwhelming majority of the PHP code I've seen is a broken mess.

Because PHP and the whole LAMP stack is like air. Everyone knows it because all you have to do to use it is just breathe. Anyone can just pick it up and immediately make an awesome website. It's a simple easy-to-learn language with dozens of easy all-in-one installers. No command line haxoring needed. Unlike ASP.NET, the tools are free. Unlike Rails or Django, hosting is cheap and easy to find.

With all the hate on PHP, I feel like it's the childhood friend from elementary and middle school that you out-grew because you became "too cool" for them in high school.

> hosting is cheap and easy to find.

It's not like you can get a private VPS for next to nothing and, with things like Google App Engine (which supports Python and Java) going for almost nothing, there is little reason to go with PHP unless you have most of your code already written in it.

The majority of Interstate (YCS11) is PHP and our codebase is well structured and the code is pretty.

PHP is a fine language if you write code properly.

Does anyone not in the 'enterprise' or studying at University really love Java or C#?

They seem like very unlikely candidates for young self-taught programmers/designers imho.

When I started programming, I jumped into a lot of open source programs, poked them and cloned them just to understand how they worked.

There isn't really that much interesting open source C# / Java software at a basic level, and that I think might be the reason why self-taught programmers are more likely to use other languages.

It's interesting to see the kind of heroes these guys have. Wonder if that is general for their generation.

General as in "shared by everyone" or as in "shared among geeks/nerds/people that are into development"?

Also interesting is their education, it's making it obvious that we are moving away from universities (although the sample isn't in any way big enough we can get the hint, I guess)

Well, I'm 15, and my "idols" would be people such as Knuth, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Then again, I'm more into systems programming.

6 UK, 3 US and 1 DE. I wonder what was the sample size like?

I also like the mag that's from 1994 with a 'beta' on its logo.

Why only web developers?

.net is a magazine focused on web development.

According to the site, it's "The world's best-selling magazine for web designers and developers since 1994"

Oh, I thought the .Net had something to do with Microsoft's framework with the same name

It's weird Microsoft seems OK with the brand overlap...

.net magazine first launched in 1994 - well before Microsoft even dreamed up the .NET framework, hence nothing Microsoft can do anyway

And it's actually a pretty decent magazine. Much better than your average internet focused magazines out there.

And the title has always put me off...