[innocentoldguy]

I'm approaching 50 and I think programming is more exciting now than it has ever been. There are so many interesting technologies out there that I want to learn, master, and use (e.g. Elixir, Erlang, Clojure, Swift, Lua, Haskell, and myriad frameworks).

I also like the way open source options have completely eliminated the necessity for me to work with commercial languages and technologies, which I always found a bit tedious.

It truly is an exciting time to be a software engineer. Barring any serious illness or accident, I'm looking forward to doing it for another 30 to 40 years.

[lukego]

Tangent: I find it interesting that Erlang is an emerging technology that you are interested in learning at age 50, and yet it has been used in production with a steadily growing community since you were in your 20s. It has simply taken a few decades to grow enough to be a common item on programmers' radars.

I find it fascinating that the gradual adoption of new technology maps onto human time spans like this. This makes me optimistic that even technology that is far ahead of its time can succeed when developed with patience.

[kokey]

It helps that you can run it for free on anything from an iDevice to a hand crafted hipsterbuntu server farm, where in the past you had to do it on expensive Ericsson kit deep inside of telco land.

[innocentoldguy]

I didn't say it was an "emerging" technology. I said it was an "interesting" technology.