[mikekchar]

I'm a fair bit closer to the right hand side of the age curve than the left. My advice: Look at the brevity of Alan Kay's responses. When I was young I would have soared past them looking for the point. Now I see that one sentence and I weep. Why didn't anyone say that 20 years ago?

Maybe they did. I was too busy being frustrated with the churn of software development. All my time and energy was focused on new technologies that came out all the time. My young plastic brain spent it's flexibility absorbing the latest framework, etc.

Now that I have lost the motivation, ability and time to keep up with things like the younger folk, I can finally listen to the older folk (hopefully while there are still folk older than me to listen to).

These days I'm trying just to write code. All those young people have soared past the wisdom of their elders looking for the point. It's still there. Don't look at the new frameworks, look at what people were doing 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago. How does it inform what you are doing?

I hope that helps! It's a struggle for me too.

[mmiller]

I was fortunate to grow up during a time when Alan Kay was a well-known figure in the personal computing world, and while what he said didn't make sense to me at the time, it still interested me intensely, and I always wondered what he meant by what he said. Strangely enough, looking back on my younger experience with computers, I think I actually did get a little bit of what he was talking about. It's just that I came to understand that little bit independently from listening to him. I didn't realize he was talking about the same thing. It wasn't until I got older, and got to finally see his talks through internet video that I finally started seeing that, and realizing more things by listening to him at length. Having the chance to correspond with him, talk about those things more in-depth, helped as well.

The way I look at it is just take in how fortunate you are to have your realizations when you have them (I've had my regrets, too, that I didn't "get" them sooner), and take advantage of them as much as you can. That's what I've tried to do.