Torvalds is just a lad. Good heavens.
Seriously, does he not mainly manage the project and use his encyclopedic knowledge of the kernel and its functions to keep the garden clean? Or is he still bashing out pages of gnarly C?? My point being that as people attain experience and knowledge of a certain area other more integrative tasks might be a better use of their (hopefully more expensive) time.
PS: Pushing 60. My eyesight now requires correction for close work but most other functions seem to be ok.
I'm only 36 [1]. I wonder about the above. I could crank out more code when I was younger but I couldn't crank out as many solutions as I do now.
[1] in hexadecimal ;-)
Line count is inversely proportional to ability, to a certain limit.
There is no steep decline in programming ability after 35, or 40, or 50.
There is often a steep decline in interest. There are many interesting things to do in the world, and people naturally gravitate to new things after doing one thing for 10, 20, or 30 years.
As long as the interest is there your programming ability can improve pretty much indefinitely.
But I still would want to know what's the best activity to keep the mind sharp. Chess grandmasters show a decline at about 35 if I recall correctly. I suspect that programming ability will also show a steep decline, but I wonder how big.
I'll keep an eye on Torvalds and Carmack because I don't think they'll give up programming as they get older.