Show me a great artist or architect, and you'll probably also find someone who as a kid made some very primitive and stupid looking (except to parents) scribbles. Take away all their drawing and painting (etc.) implements until someone is old enough for Structured Programming and Algorithms 101, and probably a huge portion of the great artists in the world would have never picked up an interest in the subject during their formative years, or ever after.

Programming at a professional competancy might be out of reach. But programming badly isn't that hard. As in:

10 print "my sister is ugly" : goto 10

Back in the days of the TRS-80, Commodore Pet, Apple II and BBC personal computers (et.al.), millions of kids could turn on their personal computer and start typing in Basic right away, usually using stuff copied off of a magazine article... at first. But then they could modify their programs and crash them in a million different ways. That caused learning, and very likely ending up producing a generation of people with much higher basic computer literacy than in the general population than today (not including professional techies).

Don't confuse a professional level of understanding with computer literacy. No one confuses the kid who could (back in the day) (mis)use their chemistry sets to blow things up in their backyard and singe their eyebrows off, with National Medal of Technology prize winners. (Or could you?).

Nowhere did you say the old guys code didn't work, had serious bugs that weren't being fixed, or was noticeably behind the rest of the team according to the project schedules. Until that happens, and as long as the old guy is solving problems with his skill set, management may well consider your "good coding" criteria to be bad for the company, thus making you, not the old guy, the troublemaker for suggesting changing what works. Businessmen have been burned by too many trendy sounding academic fads, such as all the good coding practices recommended here.

Wait till you can out-code him, solve major problems he can't, and get promoted above him (or he dies or retires). Even if his smelly pile of code crashes and burns, if he can tape it back together faster (running) than you can rewrite it (feature complete), he's the hero, and you're the troublemaker.

Didn't someone at DEC say the same thing about PCs? Those desktop toys must have been just an outclassed passing fad, and real businesses still buy far more capable minicomputers from DEC, Data General, Prime, Tandem, and ...

Oh wait.

Age isn't the problem. It's just an easy to find excuse.

I know several engineers in their mid to late 50's who completely retrained in the latest mobile development technology (Objective C and iOS or Java and Android or both) and ended up with new jobs or fairly lucrative consulting gigs. It's actually easier for some of the older ones, since they were used to writing code for big complex computers that had a fraction of the memory and were over 100X slower than any recent smartphone, and the kids are already grown and out of the house.

Nowadays, a usable map database has gotten so big and complex that it can made decent only by putting something in the hands of millions of users, letting them (forcing them to) find errors that can only be found by actual field usage, and using that volume of feedback to scale up a competent team; a team that might eventually be able fix a healthy portion of the problems so found. Apple may have put this half-baked map app out now, where millions of people will be stuck using it because they want the exciting new iPhone 5, and are too lazy to use any other map app. Using the feedback contained within millions of complaints deriving from actual mass volume field usage, Apple's map database will eventually evolve to something closer to a Google maps competitor, maybe over the next year or three.

They can't say they are doing this because not enough users want to be unpaid beta testers and/or usage analytics data sources. And it's hard to build a good database without knowing what data is bad.

Or perhaps we need a way to reduce the human population to the longer term carrying capacity of the planet, which might just be far far below 5 billion... or nature will surely figure out a way to accomplish that for us.

That's pretty much what's theorized to have happened to the population in large regions of North American just after Europeans introduce their various "Old World" diseases. A lot of land became largely reforested, but the small population remainders still had plenty enough fight left in them to generate lots of cowboys vs. Indian folklore.

Actually, they are, or pretty close. The cost making that very first mug of coffee can require a good fraction of a million bucks for the site lease, permits, construction costs, restaurant equipment, employee hiring, training, advertising, and etc. That doesn't even include millions of dollars in research to standardize franchise operations. Once the store is inspected and staffed and opens the door and sells that very 1st mug, after spending many thousands of $$$, that day's marginal cost of making a 2nd mug is pennies.

If I am the driver behind: Sure.

If I am the driver in front, and the light timing allows, there's plenty I can do to reduce the likelihood of the sleepy, the housewife distracted by screaming toddlers, elderly-dementia-candidates, race-driver-wannabes 3 centimeters off my bumper, hungover/drunk/stoned dudes, or people texting while trying not to be seen, (etc.etc.), idiots who are following behind me from potentially wrecking my car, causing me back/neck injuries, having me waste days/months dealing with insurance agents+lawyers, and etc.

Even if it's not legally my fault. It's called defensive driving.

Exactly. The executives will see big companies being sued over using GPL software. You think they are going to take the word of some low level coder that this isn't a legal risk? No way.

They are going to ask their legal staff, who's going to say it take X tens of thousands of $$$ (or more) in equivalent billable hours to evaluate all these lawsuits and all the potential risks, and then Y hundreds of thousands of $$$ to put in place procedures and review systems to prevent these potential lawsuits while still maximizing competitive IP value in ways that the even higher paid patent attorneys require. Management will look at these legal and procedural costs, ignore the lowly coder who hosts his own GPL source code on his free blog as knowing nothing about real business risk management.

Nonsense. In fact, potentially completely the opposite. Someone who profits from distributing unmodified copies of your code doesn't have to give you anything back. But someone who tries to combine your code with code which they have previously written, and give away the combined result for free (or maybe even at a loss including their server hosting fees), is still required to send you a whole bunch of code unrelated to your work.

A commercial distribution license based on a percentage of sales would be more in line with your stated purpose. Or maybe a commercial license with a 100% discount for people who send you rights to use a number of lines of their own code equal to yours.

Why require something back only from those who improve your software with bug fixes and additions, and not from all other users and distributors? Sounds more like an unfair disincentive for creating better software to me.

Actually, the authors of GPLv3 were perfectly aware of the concept of a tivo-ized app store when they designed the license. So those GPL authors are 100% to blame for the incompatibility. Not Apple.

BTW, there is no absolute App store restriction on the distribution of open source apps. Any user who purchases the standard iOS developers tools (comes with the $99/annum iOS Developer enrollment) is free to (re)build an App store app from source and install it on their iOS devices without going near the App store.

There's a C64 emulator app available for the iPad in the iOS App store. Also about a half dozen BASIC interpreters.

One can also learn some Javascript just using the iPad browser, or with some apps that make it slightly easier to type in Javascript and run it.