
Who is the longest-serving programmer? - sohkamyung
http://www.tnmoc.org/news/notes-museum/who-most-durable-programmer
======
daly
I wrote my first program in 1971. I'm still actively programming
([http://daly.axiom-developer.org](http://daly.axiom-developer.org)).

Not the oldest knot in the tree but I'm not dead yet.

~~~
scoggs
How many junior programmers do you think you've worked with directly? How many
have continued on to long careers and if you know more than a couple of them
do you have any clue which of them have been active / programming the longest?
Thank you for all of your hard work!

~~~
daly
I can't recall ever having worked with a junior programmer. All of the jobs
I've had involved working with people who were amazingly good at programming.
My career probably underlies the old joke... "1 in 3 people can't program
well. Look left, look right. If they are both good programmers then you're the
1 in 3."

Most of the programmers I used to work with no longer program. A lot of them
"retired into management". I was offered management jobs several times in my
career and I turned them all down. I know nothing about management. I can
barely manage myself. But management seems to be the likely fate of
programmers in their late 30s / early 40s. Management pays more. And nobody
wants to hire old programmers as they are "not a good culture fit".

Old programmers have the best war stories though. So there is that.

------
lanna
Knuth is 80 and has been programming since at least the late 50s:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth#Education)

~~~
svat
Some of Knuth's early programming exploits (from his undergraduate days) are
described in “Stories about the B5000 And People Who Were There” by Richard
Waychoff (see section III, “The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)”):
[http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7](http://ed-
thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7)

At the other end, he said recently that he still writes two or three programs
a week, mostly in CWEB. (If you're not familiar with CWEB, it is his own
invention: it's basically C, with preprocessors (ctangle and cweave) that
enable literate programming.)

Some of his programs he puts up here:
[https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html](https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/programs.html)
— the most recent is from December 2017. (They are in .w format; if you don't
have the patience to install CWEB and run cweave+tex on them, I've typeset
them here: [https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate-
programs/tree/m...](https://github.com/shreevatsa/knuth-literate-
programs/tree/master/programs) — last updated September; needs another
update.)

~~~
dancek
Thanks for typesetting the pdfs for other people to read!

I was going to claim that I've packaged CWEB for Homebrew so it's easy to get
for MacOS users. I went to see if it still works and isn't moved to boneyard,
and yes, it's there, but git log didn't show me in the commit history. Just to
make sure I wasn't nuts I had to check my notes and found the original commit:
[https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-
core/commit/77aa909188b...](https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-
core/commit/77aa909188bcb604bbb98b584bd0c3af283a38c2) . Apparently there's
been some history rewriting that I don't quite understand.

~~~
svat
Oh great, I was just able to install CWEB with `brew install cweb`. Thanks for
your work!

And actually `ctangle` and `cweave` already come with a TeX distribution like
MacTeX. So the reason for providing a pre-typeset version is not so much that
CWEB is too hard to install; it's just that people tend to not use it properly
and either try to read the .w file directly, or (even worse) the generated .c
file. :-)

------
sg0
Cleve Moler is 78
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleve_Moler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleve_Moler)),
he is popularly known as the co-founder of MathWorks, and co-author of
numerical computing libraries such as LINPACK and EISPACK. He maintains a blog
([https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/](https://blogs.mathworks.com/cleve/)) and
still programs in MATLAB from what I can tell. He talked about a bit of MATLAB
history last year in Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing
(ATPESC) -- [https://extremecomputingtraining.anl.gov/sessions/dinner-
tal...](https://extremecomputingtraining.anl.gov/sessions/dinner-talk-
evolution-of-matlab/)).

------
wglb
I started programming in 1965, first paid programming in 1966 (june). Still
programming, even when I was CSO (when nobody was looking).

~~~
japhyr
What was your first gig, if you don't mind my asking?

~~~
wglb
First gig was summer after my freshman year working for a EE professor who was
researching why the Bonneville Power Administration power distribution network
would oscillate in frequency and eventually trip one or more breakers
systemwide. This involved producing a state vector of 500 elements and
evaluating the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a 500x500 matrix on a CDC 3500
computer with approximately 35k of memory. To invert the matrix, he would need
to read in a handful of rows and calculate the inverse of the matrix
incrementally. No small feat.

My contribution to this effort was to read in values for the C matrix and
produce it in the format that the rest of the program required. One summer's
work.

I met with him a few years ago and he showed me the current version of the
program--not much had changed in 40 years, to my astonishment. Also he noted
that this whole system was used to decide where to locate Fermilab.

Turns out that the result of the computation showed where the poles and zeroes
were for the system. If too close to the y-axis, the system could slip into
being an oscilator. Too far to the left, and there was too much damping.

This was my first astonished exposure to the idea that we could build
something and not know how it was going to operate. "That thing I built does
_what_!?"

~~~
dilippkumar
>...he noted that this whole system was used to decide where to locate
Fermilab.

This sounds like a really cool story!

Where can I read more about this?

~~~
wglb
Upon reflection, I don’t think I addressed your question well.

I don’t have any reference to the decision about Fermilab as it was a verbal
discussion. He mentioned that Scoop Jackson, often called the senator from
Boeing, was angling to have it located in Washington. My professors friends at
Bonneville called him in a bit of a panic to say that the power grid would not
be able to handle the load. So he ran a simulation, knowing that power grid
rather well, and demonstrated that the lights across the Pacific Northwest
would dim every four seconds. Same simulation for Illinois showed no flicker.

~~~
dilippkumar
Thank you. I'll try and hunt down more details :)

------
jonjacky
Peter G. Neumann at SRI worked for Howard Aiken at Harvard programming the
Mark IV in 1954 [1]. His short biography says he has been a computer
professional since 1953 [2]

As far as I know, he is still active at SRI in computer security, with
publications on computer hardware/software design as recently as 2015 [3][4].

[1] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/science/peter-g-neumann-
an...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/science/peter-g-neumann-and-the-
hacking-culture-of-the-50s.html?src=recg)

[2]
[http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/short.bio](http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/short.bio)

[3] [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/science/rethinking-the-
com...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/science/rethinking-the-computer-
at-80.html?pagewanted=all)

[4]
[http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/#2](http://www.csl.sri.com/users/neumann/#2)

------
vok
Consider Chuck Moore, who appears to be active still and started programming
in the 1950's:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20080709050817/http://colorforth...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080709050817/http://colorforth.com/bio.html)

------
noblethrasher
Dave Cutler (b 1942) has been _continuously paid_ to write code for 53 years.

~~~
nickpsecurity
I'll add about him that he doesn't just occasionally write code as someone
retired or a director. He's usually deep in critical parts of current projects
ranging from Windows NT back in the day to the Xbox last I saw.

Chuck Moore of Forth fame was the other mention in these comments that just
stayed digging deep into systems pushing the state of the art of his style of
tiny, flexible, stack-oriented systems. Both of them contributed to real
products, too, instead of only theory.

~~~
noblethrasher
Yep, that's what I mean.

I originally started to write something that explicitly called out some of the
other examples as cases of talented amateurs (in the best possible sense of
the term, and only vis-à-vis actual coding as opposed to producing books and
theorems).

But, the cases of Cutler and Moore are probably what we mean by "longest-
serving".

------
dwarman
Started in 1967, in support of my job as commissioning technician (bean
counter title - I was only 19 and no degree) at Elliott Brothers Elstree on
their 4100 mainframe computers production line. Did hardware design and
supporting software/firmware for a decade before switching primary job to
RTOS's and firmware. Still employed. I've posted my general CV elswhere here.

Don has the longest run though.

------
loeg
Shout out to Kirk McKusick[0], of BSD at Berkeley. Still writing code for the
FreeBSD project to this day. He's "only" in his 60s, though.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_McKusick](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_McKusick)

------
ewindisch
Vint Cerf started in 1965. He's moved into positions that are more management
oriented, but I believe he's deeply involved in technology decisions.

------
lmm
Maurice Wilkes programmed from 1950 almost until his death in 2010, so
something like a 60 year "service record".

------
coldcode
I wrote my first program in 1973 but didn't get paid until 1981 for the first
time. Still writing code (iOS) today. You don't meet many folks programming
for that long today because there were only a few % at most of the number of
programmers today. Many dropped out during that time as well.

~~~
japhyr
Do you remember your first program in '73? What was your first paid work in
'81?

~~~
coldcode
I wrote something in Basic in 73 on a teletype terminal but no longer remember
what it was. 81 was working for a defense contractor on a source code
formatter. In Fortran no less.

------
dsimms
My wife's dad is 80 and has been programming for work (and play) since he was
26-ish (1965). Good stories.

------
oldmancoyote
Started in January 1968 on Stanford's IBM-360-67. Still going strong although
I'm a little slower and my grasp of the problem isn't always as clear as it
was. I don't intend to stop for some time yet.

------
rpvnwnkl
Any ideas on the longest-running program?

I misread the title and now I’m curious.

It’d take a massive effort to keep hardware up for as long as these people
have been writing programs for it.

~~~
jecel
[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538966/what-is-the-
oldest...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/538966/what-is-the-oldest-
computer-program-still-in-use/)

~~~
wglb
I would be willing to guess that there may be programs at Allstate Insurance
that have been running longer than that.

------
kazinator
Why bother submitting a 1969 when Knuth is still alive and kicking.

(Does this have to be someone who specifically does software development, or
any old computer scientist that likely still codes something here and there?)

------
peter303
1970 here

~~~
severine
Tell us more! You said in another thread that you got a monthly electronics
kit as a teenager, what's your story?

------
skate22
Another 100 years and it wont be a person.

------
jacquesm
[http://www.refinery29.com/2017/06/157857/masako-wakamiya-
wwd...](http://www.refinery29.com/2017/06/157857/masako-wakamiya-wwdc-oldest-
app-developer) 82? Quite possibly 83 now...

~~~
ScottBurson
But she just started a year or so ago, so not a candidate for "longest-
serving".

------
s_dev
Grace Hopper has been programming since 1930s:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper)

~~~
andscoop
had been*

She died in 1992

~~~
AstroJetson
She lives in our hearts, we all remember and love her. May her nano wires live
on.

------
mark-r
I can't believe they started out the article with someone who had only been
doing it since 1969! That was laughable. Programming wasn't popular back then,
but it was common enough that many from that era can still be assumed to be
alive. And if you were interested enough to get involved that early, there's a
good chance you're still practicing.

