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21 comments

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carsongross
Hey, man, you'd be sad too if you lived to see what modern man would do to programming languages:

http://www.computerhistory.org/fellowawards/_media/img/fello...

http://kazimirmajorinc.com/Documents/Why-Dijkstra-didnt-like...

The old guys wrote the best stuff:

https://cr.yp.to/bib/1995/wirth.pdf

Mikeb85
R does give me a smile more often than most other languages (everything is just so easy), though I also have a big beard. Interesting article.
Scarbutt
Do software engineers stop programming at 35?
Mikeb85
I think there's just enough young programmers in the sample that that's the highest mean age...
rzzzt
Hopefully not :) Check the "Density" tab to see eg. 53 year old programmers recorded for C# and Python.
jrapdx3
Even better, looks like there are a few programmers (CPP and HTML) >60 years old, though the graph shows n=0 for those data points, so do those guys actually exist? If so, the oldest programmer is 86.4, now that's impressive.
rzzzt
I was also wondering about that. Y-axis values are rounded to integers, even in the data source contained in a script node on the page.
simmons
Not at all. That's just the median age, and I think the profession tends to have a lot of young people due to the size of the field at the time people chose their careers.
Retra
Older programmers are probably less likely to use Github.
greydius
This site crashed my browser 3 out of 3 attempts. Firefox 44.0.2 on Android 5.1.1
trestletech
Yeah there's a preposterous amount of JavaScript that gets loaded because I'm too lazy to rewrite the interactive graphics. Sorry :(
Buge
Happened to me on Firefox 45.0 on Windows.

But when I restarted it gave a popup saying there was an unresponsive script and asking if I wanted to stop it.

Script: data:application/x-javascript;…B9XX0se30sWzMxMV0pKDMxMSl9KTs=:40

Gratsby
There's only one conclusion to draw from the age data:

Somewhere between 50 and 60, software developers realize that their skill can be better put to work managing the retirement fund.

[dead] Gratsby
There's only one conclusion to draw from the age data:

Somewhere between 50 and 60, software developers realize that their skill can be better put to work managing the retirement fund.

imadeajoke
I felt I should point out that cpp is probably on the bottom end of the facial hair graph as a result of being on top of the age graph...
imh
In addition to the caveats they list, there may be systematic biases as to who includes a profile pic and who doesn't. Even an enormous sample and perfect inferences from the face API can't surmount a bad dataset (bad depending on what you are trying to learn from it)
antsar
To be fair, they did address that:

    Lang 	FacesDetected
    ruby 	71
    r 		38
    javascript 	60
    java 	47
    html 	59
    go 		53
    cpp 	34
    c 		24
    python 	49
    php 	66
    perl 	45
    swift 	49
    csharp 	61
imh
Not quite. That relates to sample sizes and, as far as interpretation goes, it's dealt with as if the rest were missing at random. In reality, they are probably missing not at random, but in relation to other characteristics, changing the interpretation.
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staticautomatic
I chuckled when I saw that java programmers smile the least.