4 ms·

Is it common to see people at Anders's age so enthusiastic about CS as he is?

• chubot 10y ago
  Well he clearly has a curious mind... I think you only get burnt out once you can't keep up, or once nobody is interested in the things you spent your career on. But he happened to spend his career on something that is still profoundly interesting to people. The open source world is very much in the old architecture he was talking about, so it appears that Microsoft compilers are simply more advanced. (And Borland and Jetbrains did this too, just not open source compilers) There are several programmers at my company who are in their 60's, and I think even 70's, past retirement age. All of them are super sharp; they are not "code monkeys". I think those types tend to leave the industry sooner.
• stevetrewick 10y ago
  He's 56. What's your point? Do you imagine that people who devote themselves to a field have some kind of expiry date built in?
  • jonsen 10y ago
    Our expiry date is not har coded. It is a nondeterministic finite state machine.
• fsloth 10y ago
  CS is like mathematics or chess - if you find it interesting or beautiful there should be no expiry date as such. What burns people out, IMO, is lack of autonomy or broken work places, not the subject matter.
• jules 10y ago
  It's very common for professors and researchers, which I guess he kind of is.
• oblio 10y ago
  I think this applies to many people in our domain, provided they're careful not to burn out: https://popperfont.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/lifesatisfactionnerdversus.jpg https://popperfont.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/lifesatisfact...
• ctvo 10y ago
  He clearly is not JavaScript fatigued.
• marssaxman 10y ago
  Certainly common in my experience. A coworker of mine just celebrated his 57th birthday. He's definitely better at this stuff than I am; experience counts. The youth bias in this industry has always been largely based on illusion.