Over the years I have discussed with my staff, at Spectrum
Conferences, at CMUG meetings, and any other place people would listen about
age and programming. When you get over 40, management starts looking at you and
wonders if you can still code. Somewhere the thinking goes that our coding
brain cells die off or disappear after you reach 40.
With over 100
billion cells the thinking was that they die off. According to USC
Health: "Now
it is really clear that if you don't have a specific disease that causes
loss of nerve cells, then most, if not all, of the neurons remain healthy
until you die. That's a big change, and it has only come about in the last 10
years."
Over time some of
my colleagues coding skills have declined but not due to the loss of brain
cells. I believe the loss of coding
skills is part the lack of desire to push the envelope. If you are learning
something new at any age you will be making new neuron connections. The same
article states: "We
expect to discover which environmental stimuli such as physical and mental
exercise, are most likely
to turn on new neurons in the adult brain." This is like the old saying you
lose if you don’t use it.
Just a few years
ago one of my Java programmers was saying to me, you should learn Java. I
countered back that I did not want to learn a new language. I had just a
few years before learned JavaScript. One day a Java book arrived unencumbered
on my desk.
A week later after
mind numbing reading, I had finished the book. I asked the Java
programmer all sort of questions about inheritance, overloading, classes, and
methods. He smirked and answered all my questions. My mind was very
busy taking it all in for the next many months looking at our 500K lines of Java
code.
