I don't think if somebody says "I have been programming since age 9" people assume that age 9 that person was engineering a huge enterprise project employing TDD.
Much like someone learning a foreign language from an early age, or growing up in a bilingual house. Even if this was the case, we don't expect that the person is saying they were a great writer, orator or debater at age 11.
I started programming at 9. What I mean when I say that is I was able to think about problems, data, logical rules and how to break those down in to something a computer could understand, usually in BASIC (much later 6502 assembly). True, I wasn't programming enterprise apps, but the foreign language thing feels like it rings true to me.
If I was looking for a translator, I'd prefer someone who was a native speaker their whole life, or someone who'd been studying from an early age. Someone who took "spanish I" at a community college 3 years ago, and perhaps visited Spain last summer .... they might be able to do the translation, but it likely won't be as comprehensive and nuanced as someone who's lived with that language for a lifetime.
