> Since then, all my jobs for the past 57 years have involved computer programming
As others have pointed out, there are definitely older, working programmers like Margaret Hamilton [0], but who may not have programming as the main part of their job. Would you say programming is the main part of your day as a data scientist (I have no idea, as I've thought DS could encompass a variety of non-programming work)?
A common question that comes up with mid-career programmers is whether they should take the jump into management – how have you dealt with that crossroads throughout your career?
The point is that a language can evolve so much they are not even the same language. I prefer ES2016 to Python for example.
Eh, the weak typing intrinsic in JS still makes Python win out between those two.
Python turns you into someone who cares how many invisible characters and of which type for each line you code. Weaking typing vs strong typing is the least of your concern
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…
To be honest, it's a bit weird to judge a man on the basis of a joke he made over 40 years ago.
Now, I certainly wouldn't judge someone based on an out of comment snippet from nearly a half century ago, but Knuth has been portraying himself in a less-programmery, more CS-and-teacher-y way for forever, including interviews from last year. And I think he's being honest - that is who he is.
But being a programmer and a computer scientist -are- two very different things. Simply in his daily activities over the last sixty years, Knuth has been writing tens of thousands of pages, doing a lot of math, diving deep into computer science topics. (That is not what I do in my employment as a programmer.) This guy has been sitting behind a keyboard and writing code. (That is what I do.)
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…
That's the way he likes to paint himself. From a lecture he gave at my university I remember that he said something along the lines of, that he usually came up with the idea and others wrote the code. From the experience out of the same lecture, however, I can tell you first hand that he knows his way around code and that he can code. The lecture was indeed more of a hands on workshop with Knuth spending most of the…
Oh I have absolutely no doubt that Knuth can code better than I (or most people in this thread) ever hope to.
But being a programmer and a computer scientist -are- two very different things. Simply in his daily activities over the last sixty years, Knuth has been writing tens of thousands of pages, doing a lot of math, diving deep into computer science topics. (That is not what I do in my employment as a programmer.) This guy has been sitting behind a keyboard and writing code. (That is what I do.)
My grandpa is ~75, started programming professionally in his early 20s, and currently works as an engineer for the University of Utah, so my hunch is that there’s more people with 50+ years of software engineering experience than you might at first suspect. Either that or I just doxxed myself ;)
Oh yeah, I started at 12, now I'm 62, still working happily, I think the trick is to reinvent yourself every decade or so, find something completely different to do, it's a big field
I too am 62 and have been a working programmer for almost 39 years. I did run two small startups early in my career, but was always a full time programmer alongside the others. Today I am a lead iOS programmer working with a team of 4 (until recently 7) team members, I still write code everyday and my team has a great rep for doing things faster than anyone expects, and still with the highest quality results. I've switched gears a lot over my career, from Fortran to Assembly to Pascal to C to C++ to Objective-C to Java back to C/C++ back to Objective-C and now the latest Swift. Done almost every kind of programming including embedded systems, desktop apps, web apps, mobile apps, dev tools and even worked at Apple helping other programmers back in the sad days. Funny how things I learned early on still guide me today, even though the tech has changed radically so many times.
What do you think about all of the advances that happened in your time, especially with what machine learning is capable of these days (fully artificial human faces, for one)? Any advice (technical or life) for us younger people?
I think someday we will be able to duplicate the basic brain of an infant in a computer. Don't forget all the information is in our DNA and there's not that much innate knowledge - most of the infant's brain relates to the amazing capacity to learn. Someone will then take one home and train it like a human baby. It will become so close to a human that it will spark debates about whether it has self-awareness and whether it should have human rights. I regret I won't be around to see it, but who knows - maybe I'll be back :-)
Not looking to compete for the crown, but I have been involved with software development on and off since 1970. I started college in 1969, and really loved my liberal arts and social science courses, but began having panic attacks in class (I found out many years later that I was bipolar). My hail Mary move was switching majors to 'Business Data Processing'. My thought being that programming would give me a salable skill the quickest. We were doing JCL and COBOL programming on the school mainframe using punch cards. The panic attacks continued, and I dropped out of school in 1971. In 1975, I enlisted in the US Air Force, and spent six years working in Signal Intelligence. I have been part of the defense contractor corps (aka Beltway Bandits) since 1981, and doing database development/admin continuously from 1988 to this day. I'm 69 now.
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 :-)
If you really care so much, why not simply embrace TypeScript?
TypeScript is awesome compared to JavaScript and even to other popular C-like languages. But it inherits all of the problems of the JS ecosystem without providing all of the benefits.
To make a JS package consumable by a reasonably strict TS project, someone has to basically rewrite the package. It's less effort than writing one from scratch, but it's not free.