Software Engineering discussion

Peter was featured in the Steven Levy book "Hackers." I never knew that he was the main author for the Ghostscript PostScript interpreter. He is a Python advocate, and I found his rationale for this interesting reading, along with his diminishing love for Lisp. I also share his negative views about Perl, but not to the same extreme.

His shift from programming to music composition makes me wonder how many programmers keep programming for their entire lives, how many drop it totally, and what other career or retirement hobby areas programmers tend to enjoy after their programming career comes to an end.

I can’t evaluate a language as a language designer like Dr. Deutsch, but I think that Perl is easy to learn and use scripting language, a very powerful one, as there are many different libraries available. I’ve never been a heavy Perl user but I enjoyed its regular expressions, formatting, file handling, different utilities, etc… And it’s possible to do scripting in object-oriented way, which I thought was interesting...

I understand that many programmers have hobbies like music, running, bicycling, playing hockey, woodworking, or anything else and spend as much time doing that as they do programming. Some programmers get promoted and become managers, directors, or simply find other opportunities in other fields. But I’m wondering how many programmers actually get tired of programming. I mean, not like programming as in coding, but as in software development – constantly solving problems, learning, designing, analyzing, testing, etc. I guess I’m just repeating Brad’s “how many programmers keep programming for their entire lives” and still have fun doing that. :)