Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by beachy | Hacker News Reader

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Not the OP but to me, as best as I can tell from some self-analyzing, as you get older your brain just doesn't fizz and spark like it did way back when. It works in a different way - more pattern recognition, less raw grunt. Could be because of biochemistry, or maybe just that you don't have the blissful ignorance of youth, you know there are limits, you don't tend to just hurl yourself against the fences quite as readily.

Another factor might be that the industry has changed substantially, which makes you feel slower by comparison. When I started out, there were few libraries or open source. To do anything, you knuckled down and churned out code, a lot of it. These days the first step in any greenfield project is a lot of Googling, and your job is more about identifying products, libraries, APIs and stitching them together. I personally find that a lot more frustrating because of the context switching - hence feeling of slowness, less time churning out your own code.

I think this might describe what you are referring to: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170206155947.h...

I heard somebody say that as you age, you rely more on memory to infer the correct decision whereas when you are young, memories are few and decisions based either on gut feel or the current context.

I guess that means that older people are more likely to do something they have already done because it is familiar and will work rather than do something that might be newer/better/faster but which would only be deduced by more abstract analysis?

Question: do you exercise? https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3951958/ Let's not lump all older people into the same cognitive malaise. Disclaimer: I'm in my late 20s.

I do. I climbed stairs for 45 minutes four days a week for 2 decades. At 70 I was doing 1780 steps at a time. After my metatarsals complained, I began interval training on a stationary bike. During the summers I scramble up and down the Klamath Mountains looking for gold. It won't last forever, but I'm ok for now.

There's still a lot of nature vs. nurture to that. A lot more experience = a lot more failures.

"A lot more experience = a lot more failures." YES. Your failures both form you and inform you at least as much as your successes.

They also make you more pessimistic. Maybe rightly so.

I look at that differently. My favorite epigram goes like this:

Very few worthwhile projects are ever successful on the first attempt. Failure is just another useful metric giving guidance on the re-formulation of the problem and the solution. Failure has nothing what-so-ever to do with guilt.

For the longest time as a young man I did not understand this. I though something was wrong with me because I failed so often.

Most of us from 50-75 are capable of rolling our own. We did it in our 30s and edit it. Hope that answers any questions regarding reuse, language adaptation , etc..

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