So what are some technological feats that people under 30 have achieved? The only one I can think of is Linux, I think that Linus was like 22 when he started it. That being said, I don't know how l33t were first versions of Linux.
My understanding/recollection of the early history of Linux is that it owed a significant debt to Minix [1] which was developed by Andrew S. Tanenbaum [2] at age (wait for it) 43...
It owed a significant debt to MINIX mostly in that Linus did his work under MINIX while he was getting the kernel to something usable. Code wasn't copied and architecture was quite different (Tanenbaum had mostly bad things to say about the design of Linux).
The original EMACS was written by Richard Stallman and Guy L. Steele, Jr. when they were 23 and 22 respectively. Fortran was proposed by John Backus when he was 29. The first lisp implementation was created by Steve Russell before he was 30.
Those are just three of four things that I checked (John McCarthy was in his early 30s). The idea that once you're over 30 you can no longer hack it is absurd, but that doesn't mean that the opposite has any truth to it.
Edit: Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs when she was 27-28.
When it came out? Not particularly. Linux wasn't exactly groundbreaking when it went public either though. Typically "big deals" take a few years to get rolling. Much of what was invented by people in their 20s throughout history did not make it to the public until years, or even decades, later.
Throwing out some more: Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, and Johannes Kepler.
* John Karmack's game engines for Commander Keen, Doom, Quake
* Palmer Luckey's original Rift design
* Feynman's "parallel" computer at Los Alamos
And many many more if you include mathematical / physical discoveries although these
are not strictly speaking "technological feats". I would add that I do not agree with Zuck's statement, no matter how many examples I can come up with (and despite the fact that I'm myself under 30)
Feynman worked on parallelism with a team of other scientists ranging in ages, he just happened to be put as head of the 'IBM Group' which had been tasked with yield calculations at that time. It's unfair to say he alone invented parallelism, which is sadly becoming the popular opinion.
I don't know enough about the other feats to comment on them.
It's way impressive how young Feynman was when he was apart of the whole project, though. He was the youngest member.
Let me quote an excerpt from Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman (p. 127 from my edition): "... I had a very good group [..] clever boys from high school who had an engineering ability". So yes, it was a team of people, but those working on this specific problem seem to have been high schoolers or recently graduated kids :)
That's irrelevant for two reasons. First, the life expactancy for someone who is x years old was higher than 38, which is the life expectancy at birth. Second, there's no obvious rule of nature that people will accomplish amazing feats at an earlier age if their life expectancy is lower.
Third: That was the life expectancy at birth across society in general at the time, not the life expectancy of somebody fortunate enough to be able to go into academia.
Most of the people mentioned in this thread from that era in fact lived into their 70s or 80s (70 for Leibniz, 84 for Newton, etc). That might be a coincidence, but I suspect that reduced occupational hazards played a significant role.
Yes, and I recommend the article: it confirms that life expectancy was 38 and only 8% of people reaching adulthood lived to be 60.
The article is trying to say that life expectancy is reduced by high child mortality, but that's a pretty harsh adult life expectancy too. Surely almost everybody alive was under 30.
Actually, that's still true: a majority of people in the world are under 30.
Newton himself lived to be 84. He published Principia Mathematica aged 45. As the article explains, life expectancy is just an average.
But it is relevant here: if most people alive are under 30, most stuff gets done by under 30s.
> Facebook is the most used software in the world.
This is very obviously not true. For example, more people use PHP than use Facebook (supposing that there is at least one user of PHP who does not use Facebook, such as e.g. myself). I'll let you construct additional examples for yourself.
And if, btw, you argue that the users of Facebook don't "use" PHP, then I'll argue that they don't "use" Facebook in exactly the same way, since their web browser (or mobile client) is an intermediary.
