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Fabrice Bellward is 45, John Carmack is 46. Michael Abrash is probably in his mid-50's. Rob Pike, Guido Von Rossum, and Larry Wall are all still programming and they're in their 60's.

I think it's safe to say you won't magically lose your programming ability as you get older.

But you do lose the patience to keep using what amounts to the reinvention of the wheel and having the same problems over and over, and you do lose much of your free time to other responsibilities, which manifests itself in not having the time to play with every new tech under the sun.

I agree, but I think you lose that patience for reinvention in about year 6, not year 21. So, dealing with it becomes part of being a software developer. If you can't, you won't get to year 7.

And yes, there are more responsibilities with age, which means you also have to improve your time management. But, that's not unique to software developers. Waiting to see how new technology evolves before jumping on the band wagon is a good time management strategy for software developers.

Van, not von.

I wouldn't really says he codes much these days; he mostly works on code review and merging in others' code.

What about him?