271–280 of 555 posts
Grace Hopper apparently retired from the navy when she was _80_. And then went into consulting. So you’ve a few years to go yet.
I hope to make 80 - not sure my health will hold up. I did see the article on Grace Hopper on Wikipedia. She began her computing career in 1944 and she died in 1992, so that's a maximum of only 48 years. On that measure, I have her beat by 9 years already.
I 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…
How did you go about getting your phd? Did you take a break from paid work to go to school? Did you work on your thesis nights/ weekends? Do you feel like you learned from your advisors, some if whom I'd imagine were younger than you? Did you study an area related to your work at the time? Or did you use it to learn a new area?
Serious question: How do you sit and type? What chair and what angle has worked best for your back and neck all these years?
I sit in an office chair (tilted back slightly) with 3 large HD monitors about 3 feet from my eyes - I have special glasses for that range. The monitors can be switched among 3 computers, and the wireless keyboard/mouse has a switch to move from one computer to another. Most importantly, I have a dog that needs walking several times a day, and that forces me to get up and walk a couple miles every day.
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Numpy wouldn't work in JS because you can't overload operators afaik. Numpy/scipy are reasons why many people love Python.
It would work. All those overridden operators are just functions. It wouldn't be as concise or as intuitive though.
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 whet…
Any meaningful milestones along the way, that you think are worth noting. Tasks or roles that indicate progress?
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You don't know that. I have served as CEO and still coded every day.
But that wasn't your primary role or you would identify as programmer not a CEO. Having said that no matter what role it's good to code everyday.
Periodically there are questions here about dealing with burnout and learning to cope with technological change/churn. Someone who's been doing it enthusiastically for over half a century sounds like exactly the kind of person who could offer advice on that. Do you have any?
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 whet…
I'm not so sure about that (but I'm pretty green on bioinformatics). I mean, for one: https://xkcd.com/1605/. For two, if that was the case we wouldn't need projects like folding@home and such to tell us what the structures described by DNA actually look like. And for three, there is a massive amount of influence on brain development from elsewhere (both from within the fetal body and from the womb). It's a bit like having a compiler's source code but nothing to bootstrap it with...
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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