You are truly an amazing human being.
Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
331–340 of 555 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, more optimistically, if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life. I love programming too and have no plans on stopping either. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Programming is the thing you love the most and if it was 100% up to you what to do with your time you’d still do it? I mean I don’t hate my job but damn I’d just sit in front of the TV and go for walks if that was an option.
I spend most of my free time programming for fun. It is not unheard of.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#333Hey man!.. I'm 53, and I design 3D synthetic worlds with physic simulators in python and C++ for the aeronautic industry. That's on top of still running strong webdev with the latest tech. So yeah, what's your worry?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#334I am 80 years old and still working full time in IT. Although I evolved from pure programming to project management and business analysis the past few years. Originally started out working at Cape Canaveral as a radar and telemetry engineer and moved into programming after I left there. Whenever I interview, I completely ignore the age issue. If the interviewer is to dumb to recognize the value of my knowledge and ex…
Evolved?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or, more optimistically, if you love what you do you'll never work a day in your life. I love programming too and have no plans on stopping either. And there's nothing wrong with that.
Programming is the thing you love the most and if it was 100% up to you what to do with your time you’d still do it? I mean I don’t hate my job but damn I’d just sit in front of the TV and go for walks if that was an option.
Personally I love programming, among other things that people might regard as similar to programming.
The prospect of just sitting in front of TV and going for walks is horrifying. For short breaks, sure, that's really nice. For years? Horrifying.
Solving technical problems is vastly more satisfying than that.
It's like maths to a mathematician, physics to a physicist. Why would they ever stop, given freedom to carry on?
I would love to be able to retire for the freedom, but with that freedom I would want to build technology, much as I do now except I'd choose the things (and they would be much better things!)
(It might be that the kind of programming you do in your job is a very different thing though. I'm not excited by writing more business forms either. Programming is an extremely broad term these days.)
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Partly cribbed from my comment downthread: I think I'd classify Knuth as the slightly different "longest working computer scientist". He's known for his quote "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." Or perhaps I'd classify him as the somewhat more sycophantic "longest working genius" or "longest working cool guy". Heck, Knuth was uniquely awarded a master's degree for his bach…
Anil Nerode is almost surely the oldest working computer scientist today - https://math.cornell.edu/anil-nerode - He technically is in the math department at Cornell but he has been there since well before Cornell had a computer science department.
I just read his CV. He got his PhD under Gödel. He was at Princeton when Einstein was still there. Amazing!
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#337Kudos!
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to be rude but: > Not OP and not in their age group Then why are you answering?
He wanted to share similar experience with the caveats up front. Concept of free country, free world, free internet :) I had similar reconnaissance but now I hesitate to share. But challenge accepted, worst case is downvotes :) 4 years back, maybe 5 I used to think this is how old age was (would not mention my age but it is younger than the main OP), body slowly unable to do what is used to be able to do. Then after…
> Then after 2 stents and change in lifestyle, I find I can do same or more than what I could do 5 years back, maybe a decade back.
What kind of change in lifestyle made such a positive difference for you?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
By that logic we should only have single depth in comments. Everyone is reading every comment for themselves.
The "but they said this" posts add nothing. The thread is unchanged if they are removed. So I advise, don't post them. In addition that unnecessary post asserted personal things not in evidence, giving the most uncharitable interpretation which is actually in direct violation of this site's standards and practices.
It does add something. If there is a direct question, and someone is answering it incorrectly it should be valid to tell them they misunderstood. Also calling someone a non programmer is not mean.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a bit sad that people today still "fanboy" against a lang, like a lot of people still do for PHP (which has absolutely improved from the absurdity it was). JS followed the same path, ES2016 is an absolute dream to code on. Maybe I'm biased? PHP paid my bills for a long time and currently I'm a front-end developer that works mostly with Angular (but sometimes I jump into the .NET Core backends). I love JS and TS,…
PHP and Javascript both improved significantly, but both still have horrible legacy baggage that can't be rid of, namely weak typing (not dynamic, where a variable can hold any type, but weak, where "1"+2=3). For me, that makes programming in either language like running in a minefield. And still, I write Javascript daily, because myeusers don't care about weak typing :-)
Javascript is a lot saner than that. The result is "12". (I'm ok with automatic casting so long as it's an embedding. Every number has a reasonable string representation, but not vice versa. Wanting explicit casts like in Python is defensible, though.)