age of Python programmers

[Paddy McCarthy]

Hi, I'm 44, 
Male, Partnered for life to Maggie and have two sprogs Owen 7 and
Guinan 9.

I started Programming because at 15 I liked to go to the Trent Polly
library where I learnt that High School kids had access to their DEC
Mini. I snuck down to the teletypes and wrote my first programs in
Basic. (I'm still bitter that the Computer was open to all schools but
it seemed that only the High school new about it ;-)

After that I learnt all about electrons, holes, migration, doping,
(yawn) You can say I learnt much more about the hardware than was
neccessary!

Along the way I was a Pascal bigot but got over that once they
standardised C, A C programmer, A C++ avoider,a forth dabbler, an AWK
expert, A Cadence SKILL expert - (marry Lisp to optional infix
notation and you end up with a very good language), Oh and I wrote my
own interpreter (in C on an Acorn RiscPC),
Over the years I have come to realise the one true editor is vi but
you must include its clones, and you must also admit that other
editors have their strong points. (apart from EMACS which is to be
avoided :-)

I also do perl and like a lot of people here - its for work only. 

Ideally I'd do most of my programming in AWK for small scripts, Python
for as much as is comfortable, C when neccessary, SKILL for nostalgia,
and others for unique capabilities, e.g. there is no constrained
random-generation of integers in Python for it to be used in testing
Digital ICs.

I'm carefully monitoring the kids and as soon as they show that sparc
of interest, I'll back off for fear of putting them off programming
for life :-)


Cheers, Pad.