Is 31 too late.

And am studying electronics
I have done some rudimentary embedded programming at college and I have been c programming in linux for well over a year.

I really enjoy problem solving with a programming langauges but I feel I have probably left it too late.

I imagine that I would need to learn other langauges to be abl to be competitive?!!

Its never too late for anything, just go for it if thats what you want to do. You already have the advantage that you have done some programming before.

Try a modern and recent language, which has few programmers around, like Mono or Ajax.

Good luck !

I agree. If you are already familar with C you've got a great base to work from and you should be able to pick up most of the other mainstream languages like Java and Perl very quickly. And don't worry about being too old, I have lots of CS classes where there are students in their 30s, 40s, and even 50s.

You've already failed if you think you are too old.
I have not done any programming since the pre-ansi days of C and now I am learning PHP.
I'll be 70 next June.

It's never too late. I was a hardware technician until the age of 32, then decided to become a software developer. I started college at 33, and graduated at 36. I've been writing software for the last 9 years.

If you enjoy it, do it! It doesn't matter if you're 31 or 91.

Good luck.

thnks for the feedback..

I hear what your saying but when I look at job specs its experienced this or degree that..

I have college education too quite a reasonable level but I don't have a degree....

I almost made some enquiries 2day...but something held me back.

I guess there must be something out there for me somewhere in the food chain I'll just have to have the guts to try I suppose.

Sorry.. I've seen sOoo many threads asking a similar question, but in terms of employability java or c++ next?
...to learn I mean.
java seems to be the one that pops up time and time again..

Or is it not as simple as that i.e depending on what field/applications you work with etc..

thnks.

p.s

Dave Good luck with the PHP.
and thnks for the perspective.

whilst one could become a programmer at any age, it is simply a matter of practice, I imagine it is more sensible to be able to program and use that as part of your personal toolkit (you are american right?)
follow what you are interested in, if that is simply programing then so be it, but if not you can always bring programing to your field - your peers will often be grateful. stick with C even if it is the worst of all languages, java is good in that it is cross platform, but it is even worse than c++. I use C in my day to day life, but make tents for the circus for a living. It is much better to see a brightly coloured tent leave the workshop than spending an afternoon writing some code, even if the code does ultimately make the tents easier and cheaper to make.

No..

I'm British.

It seems to me(I may be wrong) that when you see one of your tents leave the workshop it gives you a sense of satisfaction where as you see programming as a means to an end,a tool.?!!

Me !? I'm the opposite
I get a rush when after I've been obsessing over some bit of code and then I finally get it to work.

I also like the creative element of writing code, although I imagine this must be inhibited somewhat when your doing it for an employee.
Re C


I love C.
I thank Linux for that and regardless of whatever else happens I will stick with it,but I think I really want to at least give the vocational thing a try and so I will need to learn something else on top.

I would say you are in a good position. I had a half uncle once. Lied about his age when he was 17 and joined the marines, maybe 41, 42. Wars over and Jennings get out of the service and goes to college on the GI bill. Would get to within 2 hours of having a degree and change majors. Spent the next 14 years at Tempe. Worked low paying jobs for spending money, lived at home. Met a girl he like decided to get married. Realized he needed to support a family. Put together a resume and on education alone walk into a job with an aircraft mfg co as a vice president.

My suggestion to you would be to scrape together a liberal arts degree. Maybe minor in some programming.
Is this like asking a girl for something? You don't because you're afraid of rejection.

You know C, you know the hardware. For me the easiest path for you would be to deal with low-level things like drivers, kernel programming. It's hard and not everyone succeeds, but you understand how the things work. Of course, you may want to get out of hardware-related things Then go to Java or C++ and build GUIs with Qt (also interesting) or web apps with PHP or Python.

If I remember my history correctly, wasn't Ada in her 80s when she died and still coding?

YES! 31 is far too late...

thats all the more job possibilities for me

<mr burns>excellent</mr burns>

Unless you do plan to stick to device drivers and/or kernels, learning some form of SQL eg MySQL would be a good idea. Nearly everyone uses a DB at some pt these days.
Also (speaking from exp here) if you know C, learning Perl would be relatively straightforward.

Lol.

The sort of stuff i've written so far is a basic irc client using ncurses and the obviously the socket API

and at the mo I'm using the lib2xml API for a basic web spider.

But yes ,I do have an interest in electronics as well..

My book on device drivers (the oriley one) came yesterday.
However I'm waiting on a delivery of a gtk book.
I've got books on php c++ javascript arhggghhhh!!!!

So as you can see i'm all over the place.
Probably need to focus