The big problem with age is focus (and price). I find myself a lot less interested in coding 18 hours a day just for kicks.
It's like pizza when you're a kid. You could eat it every day for every meal. As an adult, you still like pizza, but even twice a week feels like too much.
And in most regards, I think its fine. I had my day of the 90 hour work week. I'll let the new guys take their turn.
I actually think the problem with programming and age is that it's not very healthy. I've sat on my ass for so long I'm not convinced I will live into old age. I'm only in my mid 30s and I already have high blood pressure, a bad back, bad eyes, my brain is scrambled from too many inane emails and meetings, etc. Babbage had the advantage of being able to think on his feet and not have 1000 distractions. I know a lot of old tinkerers, including my grandfather. I don't know a lot of old office stiffs, they seem to die of heart attacks and strokes. Two of my uncles were career programmers, and they are a mess, health-wise.
There's nothing inherently unhealthy about being a programmer. If you take care of yourself, you can still program a lot without adverse health effects:
- Take regular breaks
- Practice good ergonomics
- Exercise regularly
- Eat healthily
- Avoid stress (meditate or find another way to relax)
You can let any career push you into an unhealthy lifestyle. Programming doesn't sentence you to an unhealthy, overweight, aching shorter life. It's all about taking care of yourself.
It's good practice to maintain your code. Treat your body like source code that you have to maintain for your entire life.
Yeah, when the walk from my desk to the candy bar vending machine started to make me perspire is when I thought I should start exercising more. Now I jog to the candy bar vending machine -- I think it's helping. :-)
If you think Babbage had no distractions you know little of Mr Babbage :
Organ grinders .... the worst of the "thousand nuisances that made it impossible for the householder to enjoy any quiet" .... such "instruments of torture" had cost him a quarter of his working life. At one point he tallied 165 nuisances in 90 days.
his 1871 obituary in the London Times notes that he lived to be almost 80 "in spite of organ-grinding persecutions."
It's interesting you say that, as there are many studies that show total productivity in coding tops out at around 40 hours a week, and working 12 or 18 hour days is just a waste. (See, for example, the references in Code Complete.)
It's like pizza when you're a kid. You could eat it every day for every meal. As an adult, you still like pizza, but even twice a week feels like too much.
And in most regards, I think its fine. I had my day of the 90 hour work week. I'll let the new guys take their turn.