The creator of JavaScript, Brendan Eich was asked about the programming languages and the time

Seibel: Do you feel at all that programming is a young person’s game?

Eich: I think young people have enormous advantages, just physiological advantages to do with the brain. What they don’t have is the wisdom! You get crustier and maybe you get slower but you do learn some painful lessons that you try to pass on to the next generation. I see them ignoring
me and learning them the hard way, and I shake my fist!

But, apart from that, if you stay well-read and keep at it, your output doesn’t necessarily have to be voluminous. While producing a lot of code is still important, what has interested me—and this is something that we talked about at Netscape when we talked about their track for principal engineer—is somebody who isn’t management but still has enough leadership or influence to cause other programmers to write code like they would write without them having to do it, because you don’t have enough hours in the day or fingers.

Having that ability to spread your approach and whatever you’ve learned about programming, and have that go through some kind of community and produce a corpus of code that’s bigger than you could do, that’s as satisfying to me as being the one that stays up all night writing too much code.

I’m still working too much, plus I’ve got small children. My wife is a good sport but I don’t think she likes me traveling so much. But I’m doing some of that too. That’s not programming, yet it somehow has become important. In the case of JavaScript we have to figure out how to move the language
forward, and that requires some amount of not just evangelism, but getting people to think about what would happen if the language did move, how would you like it to move, where should it go. And then dealing with the cacophony of responses.

Not all programmers will say this, a lot of them are solitary, in the corner, but one of the things I realized at Netscape was that I liked interacting with people who actually use my code. And I would miss that if I went back into a corner. I want to be grounded about this. I’m secure enough to think I
could go do something that was a fine sky castle for myself, but I’m realist enough to know that it would be only for myself and probably not fine for other people. And what’s the point? “If I’m only for myself”, you know, Hillel the elder, “what am I?”

I am not JavaScript. In the early days, it was such a rush job and it was buggy and then there was some Usenet post Jamie Zawinski forwarded me. He said, “They’re calling your baby ugly.” I have real kids now; I don’t have to worry about that.