Wouldn't say that, I'm around 30 and grew up coding C, C++ and later, in my teens some Perl anf PHP, all these languages use the -> syntax and I still used that in my notes up until two or three years ago, I also use nil from my lisp adventures and prefer snake_caas. The first languages have I learned as a young child made an strong impression in my mental visualisation of programming concepts even of I haven't used them in many years. I found notes on my iPhone using the arrow syntax with snake_case variables. And from the pictures he looks about my age so I'd say 30 is a real possibility as well.

A lot (I would be surprised if it's not the majority of EEs/CpEs) of electrical/computer engineers are taught how to program with C/C++; using that to understand what age someone is, is an error.

Based on the "being in tech for about a decade" his "initially looks old with the beard but has young looking eyes" and your comments here, I'd put him squarely in his 30s.

On the 3. page of the scanned notebook [1] he mentions Java.

[1] https://www.colliersheriff.org/Home/ShowDocument?id=94010

Somewhat amusing to see the police highlighting "trust no one" as a note on p2p networking.

PHP also uses -> and is still popular with those younger than 40. The lack of $ gives it away though. This is a very curious case indeed.

Definitely not drowning in $variables, he's 40 something.

If I were making paper notes, I would not bother with exact syntax - especially not for tokens which only exist for the machine parser's sake.

In other words, I have written PHP pseudocode which definitely omits $. But these notes are generic enough to allow virtually anything C-descended.

I've just hit 30 and I still default to C or C-style to think about code. I've been formally taught coding with the K&R (while being introduced to Perl, Bash, PHP and LUA as a teenager), and I'm far from the only one.

Some colleges teach courses with C++, and if students or young programmers want to get into game development or graphics, they're often recommended to pick up C++. Systems programming is often taught using C++, if not C.

Uh, I'm 28, and a lot of my college education was in C & C++, much more than Java/Python/... - in a large french university.