Respect! I plan to do the same when I get old. You are an inspiration Sir.
Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
191–200 of 555 posts
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#192Sir, when you were first starting out what was the standard dress for coders and how have you seen it evolve over the years?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#193ho, man I feel real lonely not finding any people who are like to screw around and code for pleasure. so many smart polished developers that would do something else if enviroment was different, but kills my heart. I would love to code forever, but I am not as tenacious as those are superprofessional I rather would like to enjoy and freeride the waves of code, And I find conversing within community dispiriting.
Am I alone?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#194Phew. I am about 30 and i fear age discrimination. Love to hear more of these stories.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you agree that a language X can be objectively superior to language Y? I worked with PHP professionally for some 10 years, with very competent colleagues from whom I've learned a lot. The PHP ecosystem with Composer and Symfony components is quite good. Still, PHP itself is a terrible language. I have less knowledge but a similar opinion of JavaScript. Doesn't mean people working with PHP or JavaScript are lose…
The point is that a language can evolve so much they are not even the same language. I prefer ES2016 to Python for example.
Numpy wouldn't work in JS because you can't overload operators afaik. Numpy/scipy are reasons why many people love Python.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far I really haven't sensed any mental decrease, but I know there must be some. I do type some source code in Python and R, but primarily I use a rapid applications development tool that allows me to build custom machine learning algorithms and ad hoc analytics to work on big data.
Do you consider what you do to be programming? How does it compare to, say, hand-writing C?
Surely he considers it programming if he self describes as an active programmer?
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who cares about the money when one has an ounce of passion for it
Because you need money to eat and pay rent and most importantly provide for your family or offspring if you have any.
I can probably comfortably finance my family (2 kids, wife works part time) on half my current income, but I want to get paid as much as I can (it's not my top priority, but I certainly prefer more money than less).
Stuff like the comment you answered to is how the people pulling in the actual big bucks hope to get you to work for cheap.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
while not as old as OP, I personally know several programmers in their 50s and 60s and all said they had no problem finding work. I think if you're a top-tier developer (which OP seems to be!) age discrimination may not be as much of a factor? If you're decent but not amazing (most of us honestly) you may find it easier to find work at 35 than at 55.
I'm 52 and am just starting to look around. Given that I primarily want world-wide remote (I live in Japan), it may be a tad difficult. However, I had no trouble at all attracting interest in my mid 40's when I went to London for a couple of years. It took me less than a month to land a job and I had a couple of options. My biggest piece of advice to anyone who wants a long technical career is to keep learning new th…
Maybe I'm unusually fortunate that a lot of day jobs I've had at one point or another gave me an opportunity to learn new tech (that wasn't the one that got me hired there). In the past 5 years I've mostly been alternating between c# & javascript/typescript.
There would be new projects & not many people in the company experienced in the tech required (due to hiring staff that has experience in their bread & butter current projects) and it was often pretty easy to jump on those ships - it does require the confidence that you'll be able to ramp up quickly!
Also when a technology is new there is a shortage of people with experience using it & companies relax experience expectations when hiring.
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#199Welcome to HN and for making this place more magical by your presence. Have seen other very senior programmers here over the years. Paul Lutus comes to mind now[1].
One question: Do you go through a mid life crisis in programming in your 40s/50s?
My story (just felt like sharing): I am in my 40s and have been programming for 30 years (I first wrote in Fortran in my Engineering College, 1st semester). Later professionally coded in C++ for around 10 years (and still keep coming back to it, as needed). Java for 10 years. Golang for 7 years. And Python for last 2-3 years. And there were other languages like Visual basic (late 90s). A lot of Unix shell scripting. I still think, I am at my best. But do have occasional self doubts. The main difference from younger days, which is perceptible to me, is the need for eye glasses, and needing slightly bigger fonts on occasions (HN is perfect that way).
I teach/guide my elder son, in programming, who just turned 20, and doing well as a programmer - did half of K&R C chapters and decent in algorithmic programming. Spent few months at Codeforces website and reached specialist level (Next level is Expert, which is generally considered respectable by any standard). And he also likely lurks on HN. :)
So now, when I see your message, it only makes me happy, that HN has likely at least 3 generation of programmers if not more.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lutusp
Edit: typo
Re: Ask HN: Am I the longest-serving programmer – 57 years and counting?
#200Hats off to you, genedangelo! I retired last year after about 40 years of work but I am still programming. I think that we as programmers are lucky to be in a profession where our personal interest and professional work can coincide. More importantly, we can carry our interest well into retired life. This is a golden age for people like us: we can buy microcontrollers for peanuts or we could have a supercomputer-like cluster in the cloud (for a brief period) for a reasonable amount of money. And anything in between.