I've been at this for a long time - John Kemeny, Tom Kurtz, and Bobby Hargraves taught me to program when I was 8, and I never stopped. I've travelled from Yourdon/DeMarco, done OO and written books about it, and now work in machine learning, with a focus on machine vision. Of course the desire for 'cognitive understanding' of the visual elements pretty much sucks everything in. I started with DTSS (Dartmouth Time Sharing System), moved to UNIX V7 in the early '80s, went Mac in 89, Microsoft in 95, and have now completed the reasonable part of the circle by returning to UNIX/Linux. It's been an interesting life when one requirement was to always be actively involved in digesting the current technology stacks and all that entails. I find it interesting to compare/contrast how I used to/now approach things...