The Forty-Year Programmer (2022)

But I’m not going to stop working. I will stop doing work I don’t like for money

I came over to computing/programming from electronics in 1979 at the age of 33 which makes me 78 now. It's a little more different again at the age of 78.

You 'play' with programming. Something catches your mind for a day, or a minute or even several months and you 'play with programming' for as long as programming that thing gives you enjoyment. And it can be more than one thing at a time.

Things like Pascal P-Codes, UNIX sockets, floppy-disk formats, translating programs from one programming language to another are some of my recent 'playthings'.

You'd think that GPT-4 would do a bang up job of translating languages. I know that's not as fun as procedurally attempting to do the conversion :)

That's about right. 1982/83 till now. 40 years for me. Its more like a native language than a skill anymore :)

Ah, yes, to go off on a tangent – this bit:

> ...and a few weird contenders for being older (Konrad Zuse’s Plankalkül, 1942-ish.)

...reminded me of something I've been idly curious about for decades now: Am I really the only one who think the name _“Kaiser Söze”_ must have been inspired by Konrad Zuse?