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My dad, 74, just picked up Nodejs because I told him it was cool. He got so excited he started migrating part of the 50k line reporting Spring/java codebase he

My dad, 74, just picked up Nodejs because I told him it was cool. He got so excited he started migrating part of the 50k line reporting Spring/java codebase he had written 7 yrs ago to Node at the huge telecom he's at. He says he likes rewriting sw as a way to iron out bugs and refresh neurons. My mom, 75, got her degree in law 10 yrs ago being the gramma around a bunch of college teenagers. Passed the bar exam after 5 attempts and now works at a Ngo representing women in need to get pro bono divorce and custody from their wife-beating husbands. Apparently motivation to learn increases with age in my family. I think maybe as a way to defeat death or something.

tartoran 6y ago
It’s good that they still can and act on it. Maybe it’s brain chemistry but so many have it and waste it. While others try really hard and can’t stop the decay. A lot of older folks who retire don’t know what to do with all the free time and end up not so well especially ones whose only social life was at work. Also having a sense of purpose can be the spark to the motivation flame. I on the other hand, at 40 with family&child, I don’t have the same patience for just anything that comes my way. Only if something sparks my interest I manage a way to make some progress. Last year I begun a slow journey into lisp/scheme and found the same flame i had when i was a junior. With other mundane things I’ll most likely get a shallow depth of knowledge to the level needed to get my work done and if needed i do some deep dives. I used to go in depth at first but lately i found that the return on investment wasn’t too appealing. I hope to still have the acument to learn later on in life when I have more time and fewer responsibilities
- IggleSniggle 6y ago
  If you focus on return on investment, you won’t get anywhere. Your child can remind you how to learn something just because it’s there, without concern for return on investment. The trick is allowing yourself to invest time in things that feel like play without interrupting yourself with thoughts of “but how will I use this?” My opinion at a similar life stage, anyway.
  - tartoran 6y ago
    Im constantly learning something new that has zero returns on investment but the difference is that these things are for my own pleasure. I learn music theory without a particular goal. I paint without a particular goal. I play guitar and keyboard without any goal, I don’t see myself as ever becoming a professional musician. But I do enjoy the journey. What i was refering to is learning shiny tech that lasts for 2 cycles of 2 years then goes dusty. Most times it is convoluted and quirky, unintuitive, filled with jargon and the knowledge doesn’t translate well in other areas. For example I put a month or two of effort to learn Angular 6 or 7 and then did a 4 month project with it. It was fun and enjoyed it but my company decided not to go with Angular anymore. In this sense I don’t regret it but the investment wasn’t really worth it and i’d rather spent the time deepening some other skillset that I could put to use. In my company everybody jumped on the blazor bandwagon. I don’t have a good feeling about it and have 0 motivation to learn it.
    - mycall 6y ago
      The knowledge you got from the javascript flavored web components and indexDB and service workers you might have used with Angular will come in handy optimizing wasm/blazor when you realize -- wasm is still a WIP and javascript and DOM libraries are still needed. Also, I'm sure Micrsoft will support more than just C# for blazor (you interested in OCaml or F#?)
  - 2sk21 6y ago
    You are so correct! Knowledge that I have acquired just for the love of it has given me the greatest value in my career.
- seesaw 6y ago
  Learning used to be one of my passions. But with two small kids and a full time job, I have to redirect my energetic waking hours on few focused tasks. Constant interruptions rest of the day means I lose the motivation to do any tasks that need long attention spans.
- ReptileMan 6y ago
  Pick up cooking - a lot of deep science if you feel like it, instant feedback, ability to always literally conduct experiments and get something tasty as end result.
izgzhen 6y ago
Your dad is cool! (Despite that I think rewriting in JS might actually introduce more bugs than fixed ones :) )
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
RickJWagner 6y ago
That's awesome. Please write again every few years, let us know how your folks are doing. More power to them.
jarbus 6y ago
Wow, hats off to your mom and dad!
ksd482 6y ago
That’s amazingly inspirational! Bless your parents! Please share this story with a lot of people. It may inspire many to follow the same path.
Natales 6y ago
Thank you for sharing this. I read the article and I started feeling depressed (I'm turning 53 soon). Your parents show it doesn't have to be that way! Hats off to them. They're an inspiration.
- markb139 6y ago
  I’m 55 and have been studying for a degree in Mathematics. I’m about 2/3 the way through. It’s a challenge but enjoyable
  - vector_spaces 6y ago
    Thanks for sharing this -- I'm 32 and only just finishing my undergrad in mathematics (I say finishing but I'm between 1 and 2 years away depending on how many courses I can juggle in addition to my day job and grown up responsibilities :)). And your post made me feel silly for feeling too old and silly to even bother to finish at this point in my life
- rstuart4133 6y ago
  I'm "only" 61, so I've got a bit of the hill to descend yet. I can assure you my desire to learn hasn't changed a lot. The ability ability absorb new stuff has diminished, but it's made up for by the shear number of patterns I've learnt over the years allowing me to discover the mechanism they are trying to explain far faster than I was able to do it when young. The end result is now I happily sit down with my son and enthusiastically try to get through machine learning papers (something he needs to keep up with). I still pick it up, well pick up at least the bits either of us understand, faster than him. I agree with another poster here though. My tolerance for the learning fluff that may not be useful in 5 years time has all but vanished, and yes the prime example of that is JavaScript frameworks. Nothing wrong with a good JavaScript framework of course but as I heard a speaker introducing his framework say, they have the lifetime of split milk.
manmal 6y ago
Do your parents drink alcohol often, and/or do they exercise?
- ojosilva 6y ago
  Neither of them drinks, both of them walk, my dad walks to work, my mom around the block daily, but nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, my dad just got his pacemaker put in, his heart was slowing down due to a genetic valve malformation. He said the month recovery downtime was great because he was able to catch up on some of the tech books he often buys, sometimes compulsively. He's learning some new ORM or something too. The pacemaker gave him a boost of energy to get some new chops here and there.
lethologica 6y ago
Thank you for your story! This is extremely motivating. I hope to be like your parents when I'm the same age.
thanhhaimai 6y ago
My dad, above 65 years old, is in college studying all kind of subject (cars, optics, lazer,...) He's doing it for fun and stay up late at night reading text books. I'm gonna probably grow up to be like that too. I think the main reason for our love of learning is "good" boredom. When I'm bored and have nothing fun easily accessible, then learning something is very attractive. My hypothesis is that learning motivation is a function of boredom, entertainment accessibility, and stress. More boredom, more likely to learn. More entertainment available, less likely to learn. More stressed, less likely to learn. This applies for both young and old people. Older people just tend to have more things to entertain them in life and/or more stressed.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  This was actually my mother's dream in life, and I guess mine also, that if she had enough money to go back to school and always be learning new things. However I tend to work best self taught, so I would probably prefer a direct tutoring model if necessary - if I had the money of course.
blablablerg 6y ago
A way to defeat death.. maybe. I am nearing the 40's and I am self studying math and more motivated than ever. For me, it is more satisfying an urge to know more and not waste my gifts by sitting in front of the tv the whole day.
commonturtle 6y ago
That's an incredible story. I always enjoy reading about how people have managed to stay active and learn new things well past the typical retirement age. What does your dad work on exactly? When did he start programming? I hope I'm able to age so well; I'd love to get a law / medical degree at 65 and start a whole new career in my 70s :)
- Insanity 6y ago
  Perhaps a silly question, but why would you not want to retire? My grandparents keep mentally active (they are in their 80s) and pre-covid socially active. Plenty of books to read and things to learn, but they do so purely for fun. Why not just learn things for fun at that age?
  - criddell 6y ago
    Not the person you are replying to, but maybe at that age they anticipate being financially secure and can apply their medicine or law degree to serve a needy community. That could be incredibly rewarding.
  - commonturtle 6y ago
    I'm open to just learning things for fun too; although ideally would like to be able to apply them somewhere. What I fear is traditional retirement that I've seen some people choose: spending the rest of their days watching TV and grumbling about 'kids these days' :)
- ojosilva 6y ago
  I think my dad took an IBM training on mainframe programming when he was in college getting his business degree in the 60s. My earliest "tech memory" is from the huge Digital TSR-80 desk computer he bought in 1980. He did a lot of dBase II/III/IV and Clipper back then, bought a load of PC and Byte magazine and pirated a lot of diskettes. You could say he's a quintessential MIS hacker type. Today he's responsible for reporting the hell out of a telecom's database (Oracle DB for the most part) in a large IT department. He's an "expert", not a manager nor team leader. He does a lot of SQL wrapped in Java spit out by Tomcat (iirc) and uses a deeply customized Eclipse editor. He's also created several logistics sw on the side through out the years, launching a couple of startups in the 80s and 90s, mostly for automating shipping and manufacturing processes, and that's how he paid for my college degree in CS. I remember when he bought one of the first IBM RISC 6000 computers ever in 1990 (he was even featured in an IBM paid ad-article), loaded with AIX (IBM's Unix flavor). I wanted to help him out setting it up or just hack on it, I logged into the console and I asked "how do you edit a file in this thing?" (I was doing PC and DOS back then). He came over and said "I think it's called `vi`". He keyed in `e` or `i` and said "there, now type ESC + :wq to save the file". It blew my mind. I was 15.
wwweston 6y ago
I'm also finding that as I begin to tread into greybeard territory... I'm still super interested in learning new things. Actually interested in entire knowledge domains I wasn't before. What seems to have changed is that I have less patience for, though, is learning ephemeral and arcane ways of doing something I already know how to do. Learn to use microcontrollers? Sure! Never really dove in there, seems like an opportunity. Timeless mathematical knowledge? Totally game. Another front-end framework? Not really interested, maybe I'll wait and see if it survives 5 years and I can actually find people who can talk intelligently about the problems it solves rather than bearing thought-smell terms like "modern" as a fashionable totem. Reserve new learning for new capabilities.
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  This is kind of my experience too, maybe disguised differently. I am finding new topics that take my interest and dig deeper and deeper. Topics I hated in school like geography, biology etc. are fascinating now, can't read enough. But there are also some weird ones - looking into how guns work, details of systems like ar-15 (I know some people judge me as next crazy shooter, for me its just curiosity). Learning how to repair various things at home (variable light switch disassembly is the latest one). Little things. Previously, couldn't care less. Picked up psychology, trying to understand why many folks behave so weirdly and differently. Again, addicted to no end (Jordan Peterson's videos are a treasure trove for me now). But still struggling with learning french, so not everything is so shiny. Or maybe its a common story for my age group, don't know. But I know plenty of folks who are so deep in their comfort zone they don't care about new stuff anymore. Maybe its normal
  - de_watcher 6y ago
    History subject is actually making proper sense now. At school it was kinda tedious in some parts. (never had anything against biology, it's all technical stuff that we here like) Yea, "looking into how guns work" isn't weird. It's just addictive: relative to other problems they're simple and physically intuitive, so for every new mechanism you get a kick from learning another easy thing you didn't need to know.
varispeed 6y ago
I don't want to minimise what your mom does, but part of the problem is that it is only being talked about abusive men and people may think the women cannot abuse. It seems like it is where equality needs to be improved as men do not have access to help as good as women.
renw0rp 6y ago
Sounds like a downgrade target than an upgrade to me
bergstromm466 6y ago
> Apparently motivation to learn increases with age in my family. "I was friends with one highschooler who constantly showed off his math knowledge. He much preferred to leave people (many of whom were poor) with the impression that he was superhuman, rather than proactively explaining that his father was a mathematician, his mother taught him at his Montessori grade school, and his family was very well-off..."
mark_l_watson 6y ago
Nice! I am also fortunate in this regard: my 99 year old father still does video production for an international organization as a volunteer, learned 3D animation, still travels and is active.
api 6y ago
My grandfather was similar. He learned to code in the 1980s on a Commodore 64 when he was in his 60s, built HAM radio gear, etc. My father who is now in his 60s is also an exception, so hopefully for my sake it runs in families. These are exceptions though. Statistically most people do stop learning as they age, and from what I've observed I would tend to suspect it is due to motivational decline more than decline in actual ability (barring dementia or other issues).
x87678r 6y ago
So your Dad is moving from a working, type-safe advanced language he understood well to Javascript which he's learning at the same time? That sounds like a mistake tbh.
- kevstev 6y ago
  I am not sure why you think that- I went from doing low level C++ in algo trading for ~10 years to node.js, and programming was never so much fun! No more fighting with the build system, getting a basic app up and running took less than an hour, no fighting with endless XML config, my change-->deploy cycle was seconds, not minutes the node.js debugger blew my mind- it was as good as Visual Studio... but in the browser?! I could go on, but moving to node was an absolute pleasure and made me realize the Stockholm Syndrome I had in regards to C++.
  - x87678r 6y ago
    As an ex-C++ developer myself I agree the builds are horrible, but go/java/C# are a great middle with type safety and a quick compile time.
    - kevstev 6y ago
      You may not be wrong about C# or Go, I haven't used C# in any capacity in probably 15 years now, and have only dabbled lightly in Go, but Java at least I find is still pretty heavy- awhile back I wrote about my experience trying node here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784272 and I think it sums it up pretty well and is more than I am willing to retype :)
      - x87678r 6y ago
        > Java programmers, however, seem to really delight in building architectural monuments and get paid by the abstraction. Lol true, sounds like a bunch of people in my team.
- dj_gitmo 6y ago
nogabebop23 6y ago
We seem to pack most of our learning into the first quarter or third of our life, then taper off to almost nothing. That doesn't work for maintaining anything, so why would we think our ability to learn is any different? The physiological deterioration may be inevitable in some ways, but there are definitely other factors at play like habits, motivation, opportunity and lots more. Your example with your dad is incredibly rare in the general population, but probably a pretty common path amongst 67-yr-olds writing giant code bases, or 74-yr-olds still in programming jobs. I don't see it as defeating death as much as extracting everything out of life. Maybe the other side of the same coin?

tartoran 6y ago

It’s good that they still can and act on it. Maybe it’s brain chemistry but so many have it and waste it. While others try really hard and can’t stop the decay. A lot of older folks who retire don’t know what to do with all the free time and end up not so well especially ones whose only social life was at work. Also having a sense of purpose can be the spark to the motivation flame. I on the other hand, at 40 with family&child, I don’t have the same patience for just anything that comes my way. Only if something sparks my interest I manage a way to make some progress. Last year I begun a slow journey into lisp/scheme and found the same flame i had when i was a junior. With other mundane things I’ll most likely get a shallow depth of knowledge to the level needed to get my work done and if needed i do some deep dives. I used to go in depth at first but lately i found that the return on investment wasn’t too appealing. I hope to still have the acument to learn later on in life when I have more time and fewer responsibilities

IggleSniggle 6y ago
If you focus on return on investment, you won’t get anywhere. Your child can remind you how to learn something just because it’s there, without concern for return on investment. The trick is allowing yourself to invest time in things that feel like play without interrupting yourself with thoughts of “but how will I use this?” My opinion at a similar life stage, anyway.
- tartoran 6y ago
  Im constantly learning something new that has zero returns on investment but the difference is that these things are for my own pleasure. I learn music theory without a particular goal. I paint without a particular goal. I play guitar and keyboard without any goal, I don’t see myself as ever becoming a professional musician. But I do enjoy the journey. What i was refering to is learning shiny tech that lasts for 2 cycles of 2 years then goes dusty. Most times it is convoluted and quirky, unintuitive, filled with jargon and the knowledge doesn’t translate well in other areas. For example I put a month or two of effort to learn Angular 6 or 7 and then did a 4 month project with it. It was fun and enjoyed it but my company decided not to go with Angular anymore. In this sense I don’t regret it but the investment wasn’t really worth it and i’d rather spent the time deepening some other skillset that I could put to use. In my company everybody jumped on the blazor bandwagon. I don’t have a good feeling about it and have 0 motivation to learn it.
  - mycall 6y ago
    The knowledge you got from the javascript flavored web components and indexDB and service workers you might have used with Angular will come in handy optimizing wasm/blazor when you realize -- wasm is still a WIP and javascript and DOM libraries are still needed. Also, I'm sure Micrsoft will support more than just C# for blazor (you interested in OCaml or F#?)
- 2sk21 6y ago
  You are so correct! Knowledge that I have acquired just for the love of it has given me the greatest value in my career.
seesaw 6y ago
Learning used to be one of my passions. But with two small kids and a full time job, I have to redirect my energetic waking hours on few focused tasks. Constant interruptions rest of the day means I lose the motivation to do any tasks that need long attention spans.
ReptileMan 6y ago
Pick up cooking - a lot of deep science if you feel like it, instant feedback, ability to always literally conduct experiments and get something tasty as end result.

izgzhen 6y ago

Your dad is cool! (Despite that I think rewriting in JS might actually introduce more bugs than fixed ones :) )

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

RickJWagner 6y ago

That's awesome. Please write again every few years, let us know how your folks are doing. More power to them.

jarbus 6y ago

Wow, hats off to your mom and dad!

ksd482 6y ago

That’s amazingly inspirational! Bless your parents! Please share this story with a lot of people. It may inspire many to follow the same path.

Natales 6y ago

Thank you for sharing this. I read the article and I started feeling depressed (I'm turning 53 soon). Your parents show it doesn't have to be that way! Hats off to them. They're an inspiration.

markb139 6y ago
I’m 55 and have been studying for a degree in Mathematics. I’m about 2/3 the way through. It’s a challenge but enjoyable
- vector_spaces 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing this -- I'm 32 and only just finishing my undergrad in mathematics (I say finishing but I'm between 1 and 2 years away depending on how many courses I can juggle in addition to my day job and grown up responsibilities :)). And your post made me feel silly for feeling too old and silly to even bother to finish at this point in my life
rstuart4133 6y ago
I'm "only" 61, so I've got a bit of the hill to descend yet. I can assure you my desire to learn hasn't changed a lot. The ability ability absorb new stuff has diminished, but it's made up for by the shear number of patterns I've learnt over the years allowing me to discover the mechanism they are trying to explain far faster than I was able to do it when young. The end result is now I happily sit down with my son and enthusiastically try to get through machine learning papers (something he needs to keep up with). I still pick it up, well pick up at least the bits either of us understand, faster than him. I agree with another poster here though. My tolerance for the learning fluff that may not be useful in 5 years time has all but vanished, and yes the prime example of that is JavaScript frameworks. Nothing wrong with a good JavaScript framework of course but as I heard a speaker introducing his framework say, they have the lifetime of split milk.

manmal 6y ago

Do your parents drink alcohol often, and/or do they exercise?

ojosilva 6y ago
Neither of them drinks, both of them walk, my dad walks to work, my mom around the block daily, but nothing out of the ordinary. In fact, my dad just got his pacemaker put in, his heart was slowing down due to a genetic valve malformation. He said the month recovery downtime was great because he was able to catch up on some of the tech books he often buys, sometimes compulsively. He's learning some new ORM or something too. The pacemaker gave him a boost of energy to get some new chops here and there.

lethologica 6y ago

Thank you for your story! This is extremely motivating. I hope to be like your parents when I'm the same age.

thanhhaimai 6y ago

My dad, above 65 years old, is in college studying all kind of subject (cars, optics, lazer,...) He's doing it for fun and stay up late at night reading text books. I'm gonna probably grow up to be like that too. I think the main reason for our love of learning is "good" boredom. When I'm bored and have nothing fun easily accessible, then learning something is very attractive. My hypothesis is that learning motivation is a function of boredom, entertainment accessibility, and stress. More boredom, more likely to learn. More entertainment available, less likely to learn. More stressed, less likely to learn. This applies for both young and old people. Older people just tend to have more things to entertain them in life and/or more stressed.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
This was actually my mother's dream in life, and I guess mine also, that if she had enough money to go back to school and always be learning new things. However I tend to work best self taught, so I would probably prefer a direct tutoring model if necessary - if I had the money of course.

blablablerg 6y ago

A way to defeat death.. maybe. I am nearing the 40's and I am self studying math and more motivated than ever. For me, it is more satisfying an urge to know more and not waste my gifts by sitting in front of the tv the whole day.

commonturtle 6y ago

That's an incredible story. I always enjoy reading about how people have managed to stay active and learn new things well past the typical retirement age. What does your dad work on exactly? When did he start programming? I hope I'm able to age so well; I'd love to get a law / medical degree at 65 and start a whole new career in my 70s :)

Insanity 6y ago
Perhaps a silly question, but why would you not want to retire? My grandparents keep mentally active (they are in their 80s) and pre-covid socially active. Plenty of books to read and things to learn, but they do so purely for fun. Why not just learn things for fun at that age?
- criddell 6y ago
  Not the person you are replying to, but maybe at that age they anticipate being financially secure and can apply their medicine or law degree to serve a needy community. That could be incredibly rewarding.
- commonturtle 6y ago
  I'm open to just learning things for fun too; although ideally would like to be able to apply them somewhere. What I fear is traditional retirement that I've seen some people choose: spending the rest of their days watching TV and grumbling about 'kids these days' :)
ojosilva 6y ago
I think my dad took an IBM training on mainframe programming when he was in college getting his business degree in the 60s. My earliest "tech memory" is from the huge Digital TSR-80 desk computer he bought in 1980. He did a lot of dBase II/III/IV and Clipper back then, bought a load of PC and Byte magazine and pirated a lot of diskettes. You could say he's a quintessential MIS hacker type. Today he's responsible for reporting the hell out of a telecom's database (Oracle DB for the most part) in a large IT department. He's an "expert", not a manager nor team leader. He does a lot of SQL wrapped in Java spit out by Tomcat (iirc) and uses a deeply customized Eclipse editor. He's also created several logistics sw on the side through out the years, launching a couple of startups in the 80s and 90s, mostly for automating shipping and manufacturing processes, and that's how he paid for my college degree in CS. I remember when he bought one of the first IBM RISC 6000 computers ever in 1990 (he was even featured in an IBM paid ad-article), loaded with AIX (IBM's Unix flavor). I wanted to help him out setting it up or just hack on it, I logged into the console and I asked "how do you edit a file in this thing?" (I was doing PC and DOS back then). He came over and said "I think it's called `vi`". He keyed in `e` or `i` and said "there, now type ESC + :wq to save the file". It blew my mind. I was 15.

wwweston 6y ago

I'm also finding that as I begin to tread into greybeard territory... I'm still super interested in learning new things. Actually interested in entire knowledge domains I wasn't before. What seems to have changed is that I have less patience for, though, is learning ephemeral and arcane ways of doing something I already know how to do. Learn to use microcontrollers? Sure! Never really dove in there, seems like an opportunity. Timeless mathematical knowledge? Totally game. Another front-end framework? Not really interested, maybe I'll wait and see if it survives 5 years and I can actually find people who can talk intelligently about the problems it solves rather than bearing thought-smell terms like "modern" as a fashionable totem. Reserve new learning for new capabilities.

saiya-jin 6y ago
This is kind of my experience too, maybe disguised differently. I am finding new topics that take my interest and dig deeper and deeper. Topics I hated in school like geography, biology etc. are fascinating now, can't read enough. But there are also some weird ones - looking into how guns work, details of systems like ar-15 (I know some people judge me as next crazy shooter, for me its just curiosity). Learning how to repair various things at home (variable light switch disassembly is the latest one). Little things. Previously, couldn't care less. Picked up psychology, trying to understand why many folks behave so weirdly and differently. Again, addicted to no end (Jordan Peterson's videos are a treasure trove for me now). But still struggling with learning french, so not everything is so shiny. Or maybe its a common story for my age group, don't know. But I know plenty of folks who are so deep in their comfort zone they don't care about new stuff anymore. Maybe its normal
- de_watcher 6y ago
  History subject is actually making proper sense now. At school it was kinda tedious in some parts. (never had anything against biology, it's all technical stuff that we here like) Yea, "looking into how guns work" isn't weird. It's just addictive: relative to other problems they're simple and physically intuitive, so for every new mechanism you get a kick from learning another easy thing you didn't need to know.

varispeed 6y ago

I don't want to minimise what your mom does, but part of the problem is that it is only being talked about abusive men and people may think the women cannot abuse. It seems like it is where equality needs to be improved as men do not have access to help as good as women.

renw0rp 6y ago

Sounds like a downgrade target than an upgrade to me

bergstromm466 6y ago

> Apparently motivation to learn increases with age in my family. "I was friends with one highschooler who constantly showed off his math knowledge. He much preferred to leave people (many of whom were poor) with the impression that he was superhuman, rather than proactively explaining that his father was a mathematician, his mother taught him at his Montessori grade school, and his family was very well-off..."

mark_l_watson 6y ago

Nice! I am also fortunate in this regard: my 99 year old father still does video production for an international organization as a volunteer, learned 3D animation, still travels and is active.

api 6y ago

My grandfather was similar. He learned to code in the 1980s on a Commodore 64 when he was in his 60s, built HAM radio gear, etc. My father who is now in his 60s is also an exception, so hopefully for my sake it runs in families. These are exceptions though. Statistically most people do stop learning as they age, and from what I've observed I would tend to suspect it is due to motivational decline more than decline in actual ability (barring dementia or other issues).

x87678r 6y ago

So your Dad is moving from a working, type-safe advanced language he understood well to Javascript which he's learning at the same time? That sounds like a mistake tbh.

kevstev 6y ago
I am not sure why you think that- I went from doing low level C++ in algo trading for ~10 years to node.js, and programming was never so much fun! No more fighting with the build system, getting a basic app up and running took less than an hour, no fighting with endless XML config, my change-->deploy cycle was seconds, not minutes the node.js debugger blew my mind- it was as good as Visual Studio... but in the browser?! I could go on, but moving to node was an absolute pleasure and made me realize the Stockholm Syndrome I had in regards to C++.
- x87678r 6y ago
  As an ex-C++ developer myself I agree the builds are horrible, but go/java/C# are a great middle with type safety and a quick compile time.
  - kevstev 6y ago
    You may not be wrong about C# or Go, I haven't used C# in any capacity in probably 15 years now, and have only dabbled lightly in Go, but Java at least I find is still pretty heavy- awhile back I wrote about my experience trying node here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784272 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21784272 and I think it sums it up pretty well and is more than I am willing to retype :)
    - x87678r 6y ago
      > Java programmers, however, seem to really delight in building architectural monuments and get paid by the abstraction. Lol true, sounds like a bunch of people in my team.
dj_gitmo 6y ago

nogabebop23 6y ago

We seem to pack most of our learning into the first quarter or third of our life, then taper off to almost nothing. That doesn't work for maintaining anything, so why would we think our ability to learn is any different? The physiological deterioration may be inevitable in some ways, but there are definitely other factors at play like habits, motivation, opportunity and lots more. Your example with your dad is incredibly rare in the general population, but probably a pretty common path amongst 67-yr-olds writing giant code bases, or 74-yr-olds still in programming jobs. I don't see it as defeating death as much as extracting everything out of life. Maybe the other side of the same coin?