Title: I too "wasted" most of my teens writing "pointless" programs - games in Basic that I never finished, assembly language programs optimized for old computers 20 years obsolete, and C++ programs with extensible architectures that no one else will ever extend.<p>My father always warned me that one day I would wake up and realize I'd wasted my life sitting in front of a computer screen.  Bullshit.<p>When I was in college I ran into people I'd known in high school who told me some stories about what was really going on in the social circles I'd missed while I spent my days with a computer, and I was shocked.  Most of my "normal" peers who had social lives drank heavily and got into drugs - some died or nearly died.  Many of them became teen parents.  I never even knew!  My obsession with computers had kept me insulated from all of that.<p>Now that I'm a working adult and married, I look back with wonder at the thought of having long summer vacations where I had no responsibilities preventing me from hacking for days on end.  Though I didn't appreciate the time I had then as much as I would appreciate it now, I would not change a single minute of how I spent it.  There is a depth of understanding I built up during those years doing "pointless" hacking that I simply could not have picked up in the piecemeal way my time is split up today.  Every year that I spent working 12 hours a day on interesting problems while I was in high school put me ahead 6 years on what I could accomplish today, when I'm lucky to get 1-2 hours free a day.  Whenever I run across a problem today that I can solve in a snap because it mirrors a problem I already solved at my leisure during those early year, I think, "Damn it's good to be a geek."
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