[milemi]

I know of senior engineers at Google in their late sixties, and I’m sure there are folks in their seventies there. Some of them are top people in their fields. Donald Knuth is 81 (10000 in ternary) and he still codes for research all the time. My understanding is that Spolsky’s job at Microsoft, which was his first job, was to spec out the then nascent macro language for Excel, he wasn’t a programmer himself, perhaps ever professionally. He does have a lot of opinions on what a great programmer should look like, and isn’t too shy to share them.