[mhandley]

I've been coding for over 40 years at this point. I'm definitely a better programmer than I was - not necessarily faster at pumping out lines of code, but I get the right approach first time more often than I used to. Whole classes of bugs are just easy when you've seen them before, but I'm also better at avoiding them in the first place because I know my weaknesses and where to spend time thinking more carefully.

At the same time, I can't context-switch like I used to. Once I get into the zone, no problem, but interruptions affect me much more than when I was 20 (or even 40). I can almost feel the tape changer in the back of my head switching tapes and slowly streaming the new context into RAM (likely because all the staging disks have been full for years).

As for long coding sessions - I relish them when I get the chance, which isn't as often as I'd like. Once the tapes have finished loading and I'm in the zone, I can stay there half the night. So that hasn't changed with age.