I agree: I'm 58, and I'm not as sharp as the twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds, and even forty-year-olds that I pair-program with. To be more specific, the younger developers seem to have a certain mental elasticity that is now beyond me: they can store more in their short-term memory, and they grok code faster than I do.
My brother, who's 18 months my junior and a developer like me, shares the same sentiment: "It's like I used to have 20 registers, and now I'm down to 12".
It's comforting to believe that age hasn't diminished us, but working directly with my juniors has disabused me of that notion.
I feel that Tennyson put it best when he said, "Though we are not now the strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are."
My brother, who's 18 months my junior and a developer like me, shares the same sentiment: "It's like I used to have 20 registers, and now I'm down to 12".
It's comforting to believe that age hasn't diminished us, but working directly with my juniors has disabused me of that notion.
I feel that Tennyson put it best when he said, "Though we are not now the strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are."