X was developed at MIT at first, then some companies got involved, many of which no longer exist, like DEC and Apollo.
Apollo was at one time in negotiation with Apple to produce a "personal workstation" derrived from the Mac II. But those talks stalled. That's really all I know about Apollo other than that they were a Unix workstation company.
Makes sense to me. Dennis Ritchie and fellows decided to call C "C" because it was the successor to a language called "B". B stood for "Bell" as in Bell Labs where both those languages (as well as C++) were invented. The lab is located (still) at a place called Murray Hill NJ. Not sure where "X" was developed, though I think it might have been Berkeley. "X" of course was developed as the successor to "W" which stood for (brace yourself) "Windows". What will these brilliant engineers think of next?;)
And I thought the next version of C would be +++... and then ++++
Well, since there was never a "C+" language, and you increment variables by one with "++" (hence the inherent joke in the name "c++"..."c incremented by one") a more logical construct would be (c++)++
I've been curious about learning Python for awhile now. But, seriously, what is the great advantage of using Python vs. C++? All I really even know about it is that it is object oriented, just like C++, but that you have to be very particular about your whitespace.
The only major reason for the space program of the 60's that Amercians are rightly proud of was...in one word...Sputnik! One of the great causes of the malaise our manned space program is suffering from is a syndrome I think of as "political culpibility".
In other words, no Congressman/Congresswoman is going to push an untried ambitious technological experiment. Such an experiment could well cost the taxpayers a shit-ton of money. If the experiment fails, that money is seen as lost into the NASA sinkhole with absolutely no benefit derived (at least from the point of view of politics, not that of the scientific community). Add to that the potential for loss of human life on manned missions, and what you end up with is a politcal hot-potato that no elected official will want to touch. That's why promising technologies like the Solar Sail are only now becoming realities with the aid of the European Space Agency.
Of course every NASA technology, dicey as it is by nature, was untried at some point. It's my opinion that the political wherewithal (vis a vis space) only surfaces when there is an external (read:military) threat. That it's a powerful, and ideologically opposed nation like China should, ideally, be just the ticket to fuel the ambitions of our elected officials. It's really the classic Zero Sum Game as originally described by John Von Neuman and later applied to social theory by Robert Wright.
It's either "new" as in GNU/Linux or "new" as in the African animal.
According to an interview I once read with St. RMS, it's pronounced GUH-noo, and not NOO. Just how Gary Gnu used to say it. And despite the fact that Gary was a Guh-Noo (Gnu) and that he pronounced his name just the way that the open source movement would later adopt the phrase, the recursive acronym Gnu's Not Unix has nothing at all to do with the African animal.
I think that the feeling that thousands of your peers will eventually read your code and make fun of you in public forums and mailing lists if it isn't clean is quite an effective way of quality control.
I agree that peer review of your code is a great motivator of quality. But, however incredibly illustrative it may prove, we'll only be able to compare apples to apples on projects that have made the transition from closed to open (like Netscape->Mozilla).
Will we ever have an opportunity to compare Apache to IIS, for example? Likely not. Nor is it likely that we'll ever be able to compare comparable open source projects to anything coded in Redmond.
I personally have no doubt (or rather a belief) that Apache is pure and sweet like a mountain spring, and that IIS is a huge turd-burglar. But how can I know this is true beyond any shadow of doubt. And it just so happens that, while it's nice comparing Open Source to closed stuff from Borland and Netscape, Microsoft is the biggest kid on the block of the closed source world. So how can we know, how say, Open Office compares to MS Office? I really think we can't, and likely won't.
though I am still looking for a good, up to date tutorial on CSS (recommendations welcome).
Good thing I held off on my purchase at B&N earlier today. I literally had this book on Cascading Style Sheetsin my hand before I decided to hold off and get Definitive HTTP instead (because of the recent review on this site. I didn't even notice that the copyright on the Style Sheets book is like from the Year 2000! Weren't we still carving TCP/IP packets byte for byte in stone and using the seeing stones of Anuminas for faster communications at that point?
I have such admiration for O'Reilly, I wonder when will they get on the stick with an updated book on this topic? Are there any good ones by anyone else that are a little more up to date?
Do younger minds absorb quicker?
on
Ageism in IT?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I don't think that the ability to learn is determined at all by age. I believe that nearly anyone can learn how to code at nearly any age. But I would liken this ability to that of playing a piano.
Sure, an older person can pick up the ability and wield a certain prowess and even artistry. But no one, to my knowledge, would argue the fact that a person who learns to play the piano in childhood has a certain "feel" for it that people who pick up this ability later in life can never attain. It's not that the older person can't play sonoriously with rhythm and emotion. But the younger player has a certain reach that will never be known to the older guy.
Andy Hertzfeld (of the original Macintosh development team) claimed that he used to be able to track and house far more complex contructs of thought, and more of them, in his mind when he was in his early 20's than he ever could at the time he was giving the interview (I would guess he was somewhere in his mid forties at that time). He called this ability "the gift of the young".
But in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution [barnesandnoble.com] Steven Levy described how Ken Williams, the founder of Sierra Online [sierra.com] felt a missionary zeal in converting people to the belief that learning how to program a computer could change your life. Ken met Bob and Carolyn Box, who were an older married couple in their fifties. Bob was "...a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of WOrld Records champion in gold panning." When they both tried to get a job working for Sierra, Ken told them to "put up something on the screen using assembly language in thirty days". According to how the story is told, they both became very able assembly language programmers. Roberta Williams (Ken's wife) considered the Boxes "inspiring" and felt that learning how to program "rehabilitated their lives".
Of course that was a long time ago, and thus far I have spoken only of the abiltity to learn and to become an able programmer. To get slightly more "on topic"; as to whether there is job market opportunities for older folk, there is no reason an employer should discriminate on the basis of age, though I'm sure that many do. But as for the pure concept of programming I myself only picked up some ability in C++ (on my own, not through any school) when I turned 30 as I realized I was getting older and it was basically "now or never". I still enjoy learning as much as I can about it, and consider it a wonderful intellectual exercise, though I have no concrete plans of doing it for a living. I've already got a stable professional life and see it as a very enjoyable and rewarding hobby.
Extra scenes are just a promotion item. Most of the time, they are completely worthless and obviously don't contribute to the movie. Every now and then, however, they do add some insight. But, it most definately is not a reason to buy a special edition DVD.
Uhm..did you actually read the books? Did you see the Extended edition of FOTR? It's clear to me anyway (having re-read the books before the release of the films) that the extended DVD version is for the book readers, and the theatrical release is for the people who couldn't be bothered to read all three books but like fantasy anyway. Sort of like for people who call themselves Trekkies but who have never read a single line of Heinlein or Clark or Bradbury (unbelievable, but such creatures *DO* exist!)
I just paid 3k$ to take the broadband networking class this past spring semester. Where can I get my refund?
On a relavent note. Shiv was a very good professor, and I learned an extreme amount of information.
You can always get a free education if you are a self starter. Just go to Barnes and Noble and your set for a mere fraction of what the Uni charged you.
Of course, most of what you were charged was for the opportunity to point at a piece of paper and say to a potential employer and say "See! I really DO know my stuff!"
This past fall, I decided to go back to college at NYU under the auspices of the McGhee School which is a branch of the School of Professional and Continuing Studies. SCPS is meant to help adults who have to actually work for a living get back into the Uni system, but it also provides for non-credit classes.
The classes have all been pretty high caliber so far, with decent to excellent instructors. But, what I've found is that what you're getting is a mixed bag of credit and non-credit students who are all learning the same thing! Credit students are being popped at the regular NYU student rate of roughly $1000 PER CREDIT!!! SCPS non-credit students pay roughly $1,000 PER CLASS.
Rather than get an ulcer over this fact, I just tell myself that those letters NYU are gonna gleam pretty brightly on that (very expensive) piece of paper I'll have when I'm done. Will it gleam brightly enough to justify the expense? Guess I'll know once I'm roughly $100,000 smackaroos in the hole.
Just for shits and giggles, I installed win 3.11 on my 1.6 Ghz K7 and figured I would just watch it fly! The speed increase? Unimpressive! I love playing with old hardware...right now I have an Amiga A2000 that is my current fascination! 7Mhz 68000 CPU with 8088 bridgeboard and AMAX cartridge with mac 128k Roms...Runs Mac 6.0.8 baby!
At any rate, it's amazing to me how stuff written in DOS just isn't that much quicker on the modern CPUs. But then, I was just playing with interfaces, and haven't yet tried any games under DOS.
I still like playing with my Apple ][ collection as well. One day I hope to code a tcp/ip stack in 6502 assembler for the ][c.
It may be a violation of the license agreement which would be a violation of a civil contract The enforcibility and applicability of said agreements have been a point of contention for nearly 30 years now.
This sureley doesn't sound illegal to me. But then, neither does just about anything that's prohibited by the DMCA. What does the DMCA have, if anything, to say about this practice? If it doesn't, how long, one might wonder, until it does?
I've been wanting to get the Linux for PS2 package for a while now. But, the main reason I would want to, as I have a number of Linux boxes already, is to have Linux running on a shcweet HDTV I'm looking to buy. But, the Linux kit for PS2 only does sync on green and I don't know if regular/hdtvs usually do sync on green or sync on rgb. I'm loth to spend the $200 if the only way to run it is with a computer monitor...
That's the wordplay (AFIK) that spawned (if you'll excuse the pun) the UNIX name.
And then Asimov went the opposite direction in wordplay when creating the fictional Multivac. Wonder if he got that idea from the transition from Multics to Unix?
A programmers value is determined by experience and ability to learn. Since someone new to the IT field has little experience, being hired is determined mostly by their ability to learn. Since young minds are better suited for learning, they are going to be hired more often. This is the trend I have seen at my company.
Oh please. Anyone who is capable of earning a University degree, old or young, is quite clearly capable of learning... after all, at least when I went through Uni, we had to learn to get the damn degree in the first place! What you describe is just a prejudice... the "old dogs can't learn new tricks" mentality which is, unfortunately, prevalent in our society.
I*M*HO, there is no specific reason to assume older people make poorer techies. In fact, the manager I work for is in his late forties, and he's probably one of the smartest men I've come across. He's constantly learning new things... hell, he seems to have an easier time keeping up with trends than I do!
I don't think that the ability to learn is determined at all by age. I believe that nearly anyone can learn how to code at nearly any age. But I would liken this ability to that of playing a piano.
Sure, an older person can pick up the ability and wield a certain prowess and even artistry. But no one, to my knowledge, would argue the fact that a person who learns to play the piano in childhood has a certain "feel" for it that people who pick up this ability later in life can never attain. It's not that the older person can't play sonoriously with rhythm and emotion. But the younger player has a certain reach that will never be known to the older guy.
Andy Hertzfeld (of the original Macintosh development team) claimed that he used to be able to track and house far more complex contructs of thought, and more of them, in his mind when he was in his early 20's than he ever could at the time he was giving the interview (I would guess he was somewhere in his mid forties at that time). He called this ability "the gift of the young".
But in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Steven Levy described how Ken Williams, the founder of Sierra Online felt a missionary zeal in converting people to the belief that learning how to program a computer could change your life. Ken met Bob and Carolyn Box, who were an older married couple in their fifties. Bob was "...a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of WOrld Records champion in gold panning." When they both tried to get a job working for Sierra, Ken told them to "put up something on the screen using assembly language in thirty days". According to how the story is told, they both became very able assembly language programmers. Roberta Williams (Ken's wife) considered the Boxes "inspiring" and felt that learning how to program "rehabilitated their lives".
Of course that was a long time ago, and thus far I have spoken only of the abiltity to learn and to become an able programmer. To get slightly more "on topic"; as to whether there is job market opportunities for older folk, there is no reason an employer should discriminate on the basis of age, though I'm sure that many do. But as for the pure concept of programming I myself only picked up some ability in C++ (on my own, not through any school) when I turned 30 as I realized I was getting older and it was basically "now or never". I still enjoy learning as much as I can about it, and consider it a wonderful intellectual exercise, though I have no concrete plans of doing it for a living. I've already got a stable professional life and see it as a very enjoyable and rewarding hobby.
"...when a "Creation Scientist" maintains that it is "possible" the Earth is only thousands of years old..."
...Likewise, a "Creation Scientist" as you put it, is merely using scientific methods to preach his view on where everything comes from every bit as much as the "Evolution Scientist" is using those same methods. And since there is no way to test either hypothesis through the scientific method, it's all still just conjecture, scientifically speaking.
Are you trying to claim that the Earth may ACTUALLY be only 6,000 some odd years old, as many Creationists like to? And that there are no scientific methods to prove otherwise?
So, Captain Crainium, are you trying to tell me that Carbon Dating is just a buncha horse puckey? So where did you get your baccalaureate of the sciences? Wassamatta U?
Slashdot Mirror
X was developed at MIT at first, then some companies got involved, many of which no longer exist, like DEC and Apollo.
Apollo was at one time in negotiation with Apple to produce a "personal workstation" derrived from the Mac II. But those talks stalled. That's really all I know about Apollo other than that they were a Unix workstation company.
Actually (c++) is not an l-value is it?...I don't think you can assign to it...
4 5ux0rz;
I forgot to mention that my little proglet had a few other lines other than the one mentioned.
int main()
{
int h0wm4n33k0xj00rm4m45ux0rz;
cout >> "How many: "; cin (pretendyouseetheinputoperator)h0wm4n33k0xj00rm4m
c = h0wm4n33k0xj00rm4m45ux0rz;
if(c){
(c++)++;}
}
How about upping the name to D?
;)
Makes sense to me. Dennis Ritchie and fellows decided to call C "C" because it was the successor to a language called "B". B stood for "Bell" as in Bell Labs where both those languages (as well as C++) were invented. The lab is located (still) at a place called Murray Hill NJ. Not sure where "X" was developed, though I think it might have been Berkeley. "X" of course was developed as the successor to "W" which stood for (brace yourself) "Windows". What will these brilliant engineers think of next?
And I thought the next version of C would be +++... and then ++++
Well, since there was never a "C+" language, and you increment variables by one with "++" (hence the inherent joke in the name "c++"..."c incremented by one") a more logical construct would be (c++)++
Let's not forget Mr. Rheingold's old classic about the origins of computer technology/culture.
h0 h0 h0!! that's so funny...
Get it?! The ship is named after Ronald Reagan and he has alzheimers so he has memory loss.
h0h0h0, alzheimers is so funny, nobody I love is suffering from it so it's sooo funny. h0 h0 h0
Does the ship go to "sleep" while in the middle of critical manuevers?* Will it make runs to Nicaragua to exchange guns for drugs?
*Reagan was known for "napping" in the Oval Office while in meetings with foreing dignitaries.
I've been curious about learning Python for awhile now. But, seriously, what is the great advantage of using Python vs. C++? All I really even know about it is that it is object oriented, just like C++, but that you have to be very particular about your whitespace.
;)
Not sure how significant one could take this to be, but over at meetup.com, the C/C++ group looks to be a dying breed while a relative many are flocking to the Python meetings. Oh well. At least the the D&D meeting is still going strong.
The only major reason for the space program of the 60's that Amercians are rightly proud of was...in one word...Sputnik! One of the great causes of the malaise our manned space program is suffering from is a syndrome I think of as "political culpibility".
In other words, no Congressman/Congresswoman is going to push an untried ambitious technological experiment. Such an experiment could well cost the taxpayers a shit-ton of money. If the experiment fails, that money is seen as lost into the NASA sinkhole with absolutely no benefit derived (at least from the point of view of politics, not that of the scientific community). Add to that the potential for loss of human life on manned missions, and what you end up with is a politcal hot-potato that no elected official will want to touch. That's why promising technologies like the Solar Sail are only now becoming realities with the aid of the European Space Agency.
Of course every NASA technology, dicey as it is by nature, was untried at some point. It's my opinion that the political wherewithal (vis a vis space) only surfaces when there is an external (read:military) threat. That it's a powerful, and ideologically opposed nation like China should, ideally, be just the ticket to fuel the ambitions of our elected officials. It's really the classic Zero Sum Game as originally described by John Von Neuman and later applied to social theory by Robert Wright.
Will they be able to create wearable skin displays to make me invisible?
Ha, you can't see me now!!!
Is that a joke? If I didn't know any better I could've thought you were being serious.
Carbin nanotubes are starting to transition from interesting laboratory curiosities into interesting technological applications.
[nerdstylin']Ahem. excUUUUUSe me. I believe that's supposed to be carBON not car/usr/bin.[/nerdstylin']...
It's either "new" as in GNU/Linux or "new" as in the African animal.
According to an interview I once read with St. RMS, it's pronounced GUH-noo, and not NOO. Just how Gary Gnu used to say it. And despite the fact that Gary was a Guh-Noo (Gnu) and that he pronounced his name just the way that the open source movement would later adopt the phrase, the recursive acronym Gnu's Not Unix has nothing at all to do with the African animal.
I think that the feeling that thousands of your peers will eventually read your code and make fun of you in public forums and mailing lists if it isn't clean is quite an effective way of quality control.
I agree that peer review of your code is a great motivator of quality. But, however incredibly illustrative it may prove, we'll only be able to compare apples to apples on projects that have made the transition from closed to open (like Netscape->Mozilla).
Will we ever have an opportunity to compare Apache to IIS, for example? Likely not. Nor is it likely that we'll ever be able to compare comparable open source projects to anything coded in Redmond.
I personally have no doubt (or rather a belief) that Apache is pure and sweet like a mountain spring, and that IIS is a huge turd-burglar. But how can I know this is true beyond any shadow of doubt. And it just so happens that, while it's nice comparing Open Source to closed stuff from Borland and Netscape, Microsoft is the biggest kid on the block of the closed source world. So how can we know, how say, Open Office compares to MS Office? I really think we can't, and likely won't.
bgates@microsoft.com
;)
That's not his email address. sorry.
That's okay. I just used steve@apple.com instead!
Interestingly enough, the only two languages SP4 appears to be available in, currently, is English and German.
Not to say that Microsoft is authoritarian or anything, but I can just hear Colonel Klink saying it now...
Ve Haff Vays of MAKING YOU UPGRADE!!!
Why is it so tough to find a decent book on this topic? Even O'Reilly failed here.
though I am still looking for a good, up to date tutorial on CSS (recommendations welcome).
Good thing I held off on my purchase at B&N earlier today. I literally had this book on Cascading Style Sheetsin my hand before I decided to hold off and get Definitive HTTP instead (because of the recent review on this site. I didn't even notice that the copyright on the Style Sheets book is like from the Year 2000! Weren't we still carving TCP/IP packets byte for byte in stone and using the seeing stones of Anuminas for faster communications at that point?
I have such admiration for O'Reilly, I wonder when will they get on the stick with an updated book on this topic? Are there any good ones by anyone else that are a little more up to date?
I don't think that the ability to learn is determined at all by age. I believe that nearly anyone can learn how to code at nearly any age. But I would liken this ability to that of playing a piano.
Sure, an older person can pick up the ability and wield a certain prowess and even artistry. But no one, to my knowledge, would argue the fact that a person who learns to play the piano in childhood has a certain "feel" for it that people who pick up this ability later in life can never attain. It's not that the older person can't play sonoriously with rhythm and emotion. But the younger player has a certain reach that will never be known to the older guy.
Andy Hertzfeld (of the original Macintosh development team) claimed that he used to be able to track and house far more complex contructs of thought, and more of them, in his mind when he was in his early 20's than he ever could at the time he was giving the interview (I would guess he was somewhere in his mid forties at that time). He called this ability "the gift of the young".
But in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution [barnesandnoble.com] Steven Levy described how Ken Williams, the founder of Sierra Online [sierra.com] felt a missionary zeal in converting people to the belief that learning how to program a computer could change your life. Ken met Bob and Carolyn Box, who were an older married couple in their fifties. Bob was "...a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of WOrld Records champion in gold panning." When they both tried to get a job working for Sierra, Ken told them to "put up something on the screen using assembly language in thirty days". According to how the story is told, they both became very able assembly language programmers. Roberta Williams (Ken's wife) considered the Boxes "inspiring" and felt that learning how to program "rehabilitated their lives".
Of course that was a long time ago, and thus far I have spoken only of the abiltity to learn and to become an able programmer. To get slightly more "on topic"; as to whether there is job market opportunities for older folk, there is no reason an employer should discriminate on the basis of age, though I'm sure that many do. But as for the pure concept of programming I myself only picked up some ability in C++ (on my own, not through any school) when I turned 30 as I realized I was getting older and it was basically "now or never". I still enjoy learning as much as I can about it, and consider it a wonderful intellectual exercise, though I have no concrete plans of doing it for a living. I've already got a stable professional life and see it as a very enjoyable and rewarding hobby.
Extra scenes are just a promotion item. Most of the time, they are completely worthless and obviously don't contribute to the movie. Every now and then, however, they do add some insight. But, it most definately is not a reason to buy a special edition DVD.
Uhm..did you actually read the books? Did you see the Extended edition of FOTR? It's clear to me anyway (having re-read the books before the release of the films) that the extended DVD version is for the book readers, and the theatrical release is for the people who couldn't be bothered to read all three books but like fantasy anyway. Sort of like for people who call themselves Trekkies but who have never read a single line of Heinlein or Clark or Bradbury (unbelievable, but such creatures *DO* exist!)
I just paid 3k$ to take the broadband networking class this past spring semester. Where can I get my refund?
On a relavent note. Shiv was a very good professor, and I learned an extreme amount of information.
You can always get a free education if you are a self starter. Just go to Barnes and Noble and your set for a mere fraction of what the Uni charged you.
Of course, most of what you were charged was for the opportunity to point at a piece of paper and say to a potential employer and say "See! I really DO know my stuff!"
This past fall, I decided to go back to college at NYU under the auspices of the McGhee School which is a branch of the School of Professional and Continuing Studies. SCPS is meant to help adults who have to actually work for a living get back into the Uni system, but it also provides for non-credit classes.
The classes have all been pretty high caliber so far, with decent to excellent instructors. But, what I've found is that what you're getting is a mixed bag of credit and non-credit students who are all learning the same thing! Credit students are being popped at the regular NYU student rate of roughly $1000 PER CREDIT!!! SCPS non-credit students pay roughly $1,000 PER CLASS.
Rather than get an ulcer over this fact, I just tell myself that those letters NYU are gonna gleam pretty brightly on that (very expensive) piece of paper I'll have when I'm done. Will it gleam brightly enough to justify the expense? Guess I'll know once I'm roughly $100,000 smackaroos in the hole.
Just for shits and giggles, I installed win 3.11 on my 1.6 Ghz K7 and figured I would just watch it fly! The speed increase? Unimpressive! I love playing with old hardware...right now I have an Amiga A2000 that is my current fascination! 7Mhz 68000 CPU with 8088 bridgeboard and AMAX cartridge with mac 128k Roms...Runs Mac 6.0.8 baby!
At any rate, it's amazing to me how stuff written in DOS just isn't that much quicker on the modern CPUs. But then, I was just playing with interfaces, and haven't yet tried any games under DOS.
I still like playing with my Apple ][ collection as well. One day I hope to code a tcp/ip stack in 6502 assembler for the ][c.
No its not.
It may be a violation of the license agreement which would be a violation of a civil contract The enforcibility and applicability of said agreements have been a point of contention for nearly 30 years now.
This sureley doesn't sound illegal to me. But then, neither does just about anything that's prohibited by the DMCA. What does the DMCA have, if anything, to say about this practice? If it doesn't, how long, one might wonder, until it does?
I've been wanting to get the Linux for PS2 package for a while now. But, the main reason I would want to, as I have a number of Linux boxes already, is to have Linux running on a shcweet HDTV I'm looking to buy. But, the Linux kit for PS2 only does sync on green and I don't know if regular/hdtvs usually do sync on green or sync on rgb. I'm loth to spend the $200 if the only way to run it is with a computer monitor...
That's the wordplay (AFIK) that spawned (if you'll excuse the pun) the UNIX name.
And then Asimov went the opposite direction in wordplay when creating the fictional Multivac. Wonder if he got that idea from the transition from Multics to Unix?
A programmers value is determined by experience and ability to learn. Since someone new to the IT field has little experience, being hired is determined mostly by their ability to learn. Since young minds are better suited for learning, they are going to be hired more often. This is the trend I have seen at my company.
Oh please. Anyone who is capable of earning a University degree, old or young, is quite clearly capable of learning... after all, at least when I went through Uni, we had to learn to get the damn degree in the first place! What you describe is just a prejudice... the "old dogs can't learn new tricks" mentality which is, unfortunately, prevalent in our society.
I*M*HO, there is no specific reason to assume older people make poorer techies. In fact, the manager I work for is in his late forties, and he's probably one of the smartest men I've come across. He's constantly learning new things... hell, he seems to have an easier time keeping up with trends than I do!
I don't think that the ability to learn is determined at all by age. I believe that nearly anyone can learn how to code at nearly any age. But I would liken this ability to that of playing a piano.
Sure, an older person can pick up the ability and wield a certain prowess and even artistry. But no one, to my knowledge, would argue the fact that a person who learns to play the piano in childhood has a certain "feel" for it that people who pick up this ability later in life can never attain. It's not that the older person can't play sonoriously with rhythm and emotion. But the younger player has a certain reach that will never be known to the older guy.
Andy Hertzfeld (of the original Macintosh development team) claimed that he used to be able to track and house far more complex contructs of thought, and more of them, in his mind when he was in his early 20's than he ever could at the time he was giving the interview (I would guess he was somewhere in his mid forties at that time). He called this ability "the gift of the young".
But in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution Steven Levy described how Ken Williams, the founder of Sierra Online felt a missionary zeal in converting people to the belief that learning how to program a computer could change your life. Ken met Bob and Carolyn Box, who were an older married couple in their fifties. Bob was "...a former New Yorker, a former engineer, a former race car driver, a former jockey, and a former Guinness Book of WOrld Records champion in gold panning." When they both tried to get a job working for Sierra, Ken told them to "put up something on the screen using assembly language in thirty days". According to how the story is told, they both became very able assembly language programmers. Roberta Williams (Ken's wife) considered the Boxes "inspiring" and felt that learning how to program "rehabilitated their lives".
Of course that was a long time ago, and thus far I have spoken only of the abiltity to learn and to become an able programmer. To get slightly more "on topic"; as to whether there is job market opportunities for older folk, there is no reason an employer should discriminate on the basis of age, though I'm sure that many do. But as for the pure concept of programming I myself only picked up some ability in C++ (on my own, not through any school) when I turned 30 as I realized I was getting older and it was basically "now or never". I still enjoy learning as much as I can about it, and consider it a wonderful intellectual exercise, though I have no concrete plans of doing it for a living. I've already got a stable professional life and see it as a very enjoyable and rewarding hobby.
"...when a "Creation Scientist" maintains that it is "possible" the Earth is only thousands of years old..."
...Likewise, a "Creation Scientist" as you put it, is merely using scientific methods to preach his view on where everything comes from every bit as much as the "Evolution Scientist" is using those same methods. And since there is no way to test either hypothesis through the scientific method, it's all still just conjecture, scientifically speaking.
Are you trying to claim that the Earth may ACTUALLY be only 6,000 some odd years old, as many Creationists like to? And that there are no scientific methods to prove otherwise?
So, Captain Crainium, are you trying to tell me that Carbon Dating is just a buncha horse puckey? So where did you get your baccalaureate of the sciences? Wassamatta U?