Ha ha, I like it! Reminded me of when I was writing Organizational Culture (Part VI): Sociology:

An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.

-- Planck's Principle

A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of thirty will never do so

-- Albert Einstein

Designer	Language	Age
John Backus	FORTRAN	30
Dennis Ritchie	C	30
Bjarne Stroustrup	C++	30
Yukihiro Matsumoto	Ruby	30
John McCarthy	LISP	32
Brendan Eich	Javascript	33
Larry Wall	Perl	33
Guido van Rossum	Python	34
James Gosling	Java	39
Anders Hejlsberg	C#	39

It will be interesting to see if more breakthroughs are made by older folks if life expectancy improves further, especially if it dramatically improves via genetic engineering ... though I won't be around to see it. :)

Update: As pointed out to me in the Chatterbox, note that many of the ten computer language designers in the table above had already made important contributions in their twenties. Anders Hejlsberg, for example, wrote the core of the Turbo Pascal compiler in his early twenties, while still a student. Dennis Ritchie was a pioneer developer of the Multics and Unix operating systems. Please feel free to point out earlier contributions made by others in the table above.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.