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"People who did great things often did so at very surprisingly young ages". This is very true, Gates was 19 (BASIC), Linus was 21 (Linux), Wozniak 25 (Apple I),

• joaomacp 8y ago
  Yeah, I think 'ageism' exists both ways: if you're 20 you're considered too young, but at 45 you're already too old for certain things. You can create complex things while young, but also you can pick up skateboarding at 40.
• tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Babbage 41 (Babbage machine), John Backus 30 (Fortran), Tim Berners-Lee 34 (World Wide Web), Fred Brooks 30 (IBM S/360), George Bool 32 (Symbolic Logic), Vannevar Bush 55 (memex, forerunner to hypertext), Vint Cerf 29 (TCP/IP), Alonzo Church 36 (Entscheidungsproblem) and so on.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• HiroshiSan 8y ago
  I would love to see data on the age they decided to master a given field. For instance if you decide to master programming (w.e that means) and it takes roughly 10 years to achieve mastery then you should expect a great accomplishment 10 years after you've started diving deep in a field. My assumption that it's rarer for those who are older is probably due to the fact that they have to worry about making a living and there aren't as many resources where you can engage with your peers outside of university, and also the fact that as a kid, making mistakes is not frowned upon but merely a process of discovery, whereas when you're older there is a lot of negative emotions associated with failure.
• wilsonnb2 8y ago
  Of course it sounds true if you only list the data points that fit the position.