What's the Shelf Life of a Programmer?

Esther Schindler writes "Why is it that young developers imagine that older programmers can't program in a modern environment? Too many of us of a 'certain age' are facing an IT work environment that is hostile to older workers. Lately, Steven Vaughan-Nichols has been been noticing that the old meme about how grandpa can't understand iPhones, Linux, or the cloud is showing up more often even as it's becoming increasingly irrelevant. The truth is: Many older developers are every bit as good as young programmers, and he cites plenty of example of still-relevant geeks to prove it. And he writes, 'Sadly, while that should have put an end to the idea that long hours are a fact of IT life, this remnant of our factory-line past lingers both in high tech and in other industries. But what really matters is who's productive and who's not.'"

Just keep learning and you'll be fine

[NinjaTekNeeks]

IT is always evolving and there is always new stuff. If you choose not to evolve and learn new things then you will become out dated and have problems finding a job. This is not unique to programming, demand for NT 4 Server and Exchange 5.5 admins is probably pretty low these days.

Re:Comments by an old programmer

[Animats]

What about the Go language as a replacement to C?

Go is primarily intended for writing server-side web applications that need to go fast. This is a huge market and a crucial part of Google's business. But it's a garbage-collected language. It's not suitable for writing the garbage collector itself, or for embedded applications. It's not a language you can use down at the bottom. Go itself is implemented in C, not Go.

Erlang can be used down at the bottom on bare metal, but is not popular outside the telecom area.