What Is The Best Age To Create A Programming Language?

Tom Smykowski
2 min readMay 20, 2024
Photo by cottonbro studio / Pexels

Breck Yunits published an interesting research results. He was interested what age were people that created a programming language.

What do you think? Are programming languages created by young people? Or maybe older?

For example Perl 6 and Raku were created by people over their 60s.

On the other hand PHP or Kotlin by people under their 30s.

Javascript, by 34 years old. Python — 35, C — 31, Java — 40.

The median age is 36 years, min age 16 years and max age - 70.

The results are quite interesting for two reasons. Firstly, because programming languages are developed surprisingly by older people.

It’s not too popular among younger population that usual comes with interesting ideas.

One of the reasons may be that the mathematical theory behind programming languages, and understanding of programming language design takes time.

Not to mention finding an application for a new language that solves new classes of problems.

From the other side these results are also surprising, because people inventing languages are quite young.

You’d imagine languages are created by people in their 50s or 60s when they…

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Tom Smykowski

Software Engineer & Tech Editor. Top 2% on StackOverflow, 3mil views on Quora. Won Shattered Pixel Dungeon.