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Original post by ibebrett Quote: Original post by Eelco I have quite often tried to teach 20+ people how to program, and its not easy for them. Computer languages are really quite different from human languages, and many people I know have a really hard time adapting the to sheer level of autism a computer demands from you. It doesnt read between the lines. Besides, learning to program well requires time; lots of it; the kind of time grownups hardly ever have. ? My theory is that most people who would have taken an interest at that point (people who would enjoy programming) already have. The rest are being forced into it by a job requirement or class they must take. The further out in age groups you go, the more likely that those have an interest have already checked it out (especially during teenage years), and the more likely the people you have to teach aren't the programmer type.

Sure, that is a complicating factor. However, most people I know never really tried learning to program at any age.

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Original post by JoeCooper I taught my wife of 26 to program. She just plain got it, and managed to write some useful programs for use at work. Her education? Masters in literature. Did dramatically better than others I've tried to teach at much younger ages, including some who spend all their time tinkering with computers. One 18 year old friend of mine, in the end, threw his hands up and said "screw it, I'm joining the army instead." He did. I also have another friend who started in college and seems to be a pretty badass machine learning specialist now. I taught an artist friend some Java (not &#106avascript) and he just got it, though he decided it wasn't what he wanted to commit himself to.<br><br>Some folks just get it, some seem to be pathologically unable to, and I haven't spotted a pattern in age, gender or intellectual background.<!--QUOTE--></td></tr></table></blockquote><!--/QUOTE--><!--ENDQUOTE--><br><br>Writing some useful programs is not the same as being an excellent programmer. But granted, the individual differences between people are undoubtly huge.<br><br>That said, I think you can teach most 5yolds to program, whereas it is a hopeless excercise for any but a few adults.

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Original post by Eelco Do you actually know of any outstanding programmers that started after 25, or is that belief of yours based in faith?

It is based in strong faith and in what has been written by many experienced people in this forum in similar threads. I am just saying that when you are 30 or 40 you are not mentally handicapped compared to a 16 year old. Okay there is research that says you peak at a young age X, but this is no big deal IMO. Physicists can still produce high quality research in their 60's. A lot of things help you towards being a great programmer: patience, passion / motivation, analytical thinking / problem solving skills, a suitably wired brain, having a generally technical background etc. You do not need to write a line of code to have all these traits. And if you have these traits age alone will not be a significant hurdle. I am not saying that there is not a correlation between the starting age and the success in this area. But a correlation does not imply direct causation. I mean, don't tell a person he won't succeed just because of his age. Tell him he may fail because he is not determined enough. Ibebrett has also a good point IMO.

There are maintenance jobs which don't require you to learn or know 20 languages.
Surely people still write code in COBOL, I know they do at my work.

Work isn't about coding in new languages.
Work is about getting things done.

I can understand that pretty GUI requires latest programming languages, and probably a mix of them. However there are servers that need to be maintained and enhanced, and I just can't imagine any back-end code is written in C# or any other language which is only a few years old.

I don't know, most of the younger programmers at work are pretty quick to find new jobs...But then our company does mostly embedded systems work where you might only have a total of 2k to work with.

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Original post by godsenddeath Quote: Original post by VerMan ... I'm just thinking since i see job postings ("from 2x to 35", "over 40 need not to apply", etc) You've actually seen job postings where they state that people 40+ shouldn't apply? Seems a bit odd since in many places it's considered unethical, if not illegal to do such a thing.

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Original post by Rycross Where are you seeing such job postings? I haven't seen a single job posting along those lines, and in the US such a job posting is technically illegal.

I actually meant to comment on this earlier. I haven't seen such ads either, 'course I haven't needed to look in the last 12 months (Thank goodness). Stateside I know the Age Discrimination in Employment Act comes into play.

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Original post by way2lazy2care Quote: Original post by shuma-gorath I dunno, articles like these seem to suggest [decrease in brain function/speed] starts "after 40," which could conceivably mean 40 and a day. The latter one implies that mostly one's typing speed would be affected. Of course, programmer's are divided about the impact that would have. ...how much of your time is actually spent typing? It's actually quite small when you consider how the job relies almost completely on the ability to type code.

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Original post by JoeCooper And let's not forget the typing aides in IDEs. Last time I used Visual Studio, it was rather good at filling in blanks and I got very used to typing a few glyphs and hitting enter. Autocomplete rules.

When it works (i.e. when it doesn't bail).

EDIT: As I think about it some more, there are places where "autocomplete" doesn't even work, like in Visual Studio's "find" box. The time it takes to click and scan that drop-down box has to add up.

[Edited by - shuma-gorath on December 31, 2010 1:15:38 PM]

I'm over 40. I recently just switched jobs to help me bring my skillset up to date - moving away from traditional C/C++ apps to web apps, both client and server, in a chaotic jumble of Java, &#106avascript, Perl/Mason, HTML/CSS/XML/JSON, *nix shell scripts, some Python, a bit of Ruby in odd places, and even still the occasional bit of C++. It hasn't been particularly difficult as far as picking up the new languages goes. Once you know one algol-derived language you know them all and you just need to adjust to whatever idiomatic syntax forms are popular.

What's been difficult is moving away from an environment that at least makes honest efforts at good software engineering to one that is, at least in comparison, almost pure cowboy coding with release cycles measured in weeks at most. Good tool support is completely out the window - tail and grep, while they do get the job done eventually, should be the *last* option, not the first and only. And particularly frustrusting is the lack of good debugger support. Staring at code and "printf-style" debugging are considered state-of-the-art. The lack of time (and management willingness) to do proper testing leads to a never-ending stream of minor bug fixes that simply wouldn't ever have shipped in my old job.

I'm still a code monkey. I make occasional forays into small-time management but like somebody else said it's not really my thing. I also have absolutely zero interest in the business side of things. My interest in sales and marketing is in the negatives. So even if I were to move completely to management there is a definite limit in how far I could go. I do some architect stuff as well but I tend to get caught up in the details of the implementation.

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Original post by way2lazy2care Quote: Original post by shuma-gorath I dunno, articles like these seem to suggest it starts "after 40," which could conceivably mean 40 and a day. The latter one implies that mostly one's typing speed would be affected. Of course, programmer's are divided about the impact that would have. well how much of your day is actually spent programming? Or more to the point, how much of your time is actually spent typing? It's actually quite small when you consider how the job relies almost completely on the ability to type code.

This. I've always considered arguments about typing speed to be idio..., uncompelling. Hell, I guy I worked with a few years ago broke both arms snowboarding and spent a month "typing" using the ends of a couple pencils to push keys. It made no noticable dent in his schedule.

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Original post by shuma-gorath The latter one implies that mostly one's typing speed would be affected. Of course, programmer's are divided about the impact that would have.

Given that I've worked with a developer with cerebral palsy, I'm firmly in the "Typing speed doesn't matter," camp. Personally, I'm more concerned about my mental agility as I age.

FWIW, the average ago of the software developers at my company is probably 50. Pretty much everyone here is competent and professional. One or two of them have expressed some hesitancy with adopting new tech, but overall it hasn't caused any perceptible problems.

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Original post by Rycross Quote: Original post by shuma-gorath The latter one implies that mostly one's typing speed would be affected. Of course, programmer's are divided about the impact that would have. Given that I've worked with a developer with cerebral palsy, I'm firmly in the "Typing speed doesn't matter," camp. Personally, I'm more concerned about my mental agility as I age.

One of my CS teachers lost his arm in combat duty. His "home row" was the middle of the keyboard. He would center his hand inside the F and J ridges and go from there. He wasn't going to win any speed contests but given the amount of actual typing a good programmer does in a day (ie a good programmer plans out what he is going to do before typing) the difference between 50 WPM and 20 WPM isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things.