The last veteran that served in the US civil war died in 1956 . More time has elapsed between when stegosaurus roamed the planet and TRex roamed the planet than between the time of the TRex and now . <| sep |> Ack , I am so sorry for missing this and leaving you hanging I sometimes go long periods of time just lurking instead of logging in , so I ' m just noticing this comment now . Regarding physics , it ' s a good question . I hope to use the next year or two building up both good experience as a software developer and a hefty financial cushion andor paying off the majority of my very sizeable student debt early . If I can fit a technology fellowship in there at some point , that would be ideal . After that , my nebulous plan is to head to grad school and resume my science studies in some dualdegree program , with the science degree perhaps being physics again or computer science or something similar , and the other DEFINITELY being a degree related to public policy . The public policy degree thing is a whole separate topic that I could go on for pages about so I won ' t , for the sake of brevity , but my thinking here with the timing of the extra schooling is that after taking these few years off , I will be able to go into it a older , more mature , and more motivated to be successful in my studies than those students who head to grad school right after college as just the next thing to do you know what I mean and plenty of research has shown that older students , even those with fulltime jobs andor families to take care of , often outperform younger students because of the motivation difference , b with a significant formal skills foundation in software development as opposed to mere programming , which is something that tends to be lacking among those working in the physics and science fields yet could really help speed things along when writing code for research , and c in a much healthier and more secure place financially than what most grad students find themselves in even the stipendpaid ones , like those in STEM programs , because those stipends still usually force you to budget your expenses heavily , especially since grad students often also have to start paying back student loans from college on those stipends at the same time . I had similar feelings as you with approaching programming . Getting a good education on the fundamentals of programming was extremely helpful for getting me truly interested in it and wanting to practice it more . The bootcamp experience itself was very timeconsuming but overall positive . And I ' m really grateful for going through with it , because the position I ' m in currently is a fairly nice one even if it did throw me into a huge codebase with a 9 tier architecture for the application where ABSOLUTELY NONE OF THE CODE IS DOCUMENTED sorting that was a frustrating experience for my first sprint on the team . And the company itself is also quite nice , with a company culture that is quite amicable and accepting if a bit conservative for my tastes . Finally , as far as languages are concerned , at this point I still prefer Node and Javascript . I know JS can get a bad rap from some very . opinionated programmers and CS majors for some design flaws and for being dynamically typed , but I actually miss it now that I ' m doing mainly C # work . Since C # is a strongly typed language like C , there are some patterns that arise in it that don ' t come up much in Node and that I ' ve found a bit difficult to wrap my mind around , such as dependency injection which I never needed to worry about before in Nodeland , because Node ' s require statements take care of all the dependency heavy lifting for you and inversion of control which is linked to dependency injection , so I never needed to know or worry about it in Node development either . The Javascript ecosystem has exploded in the last few years , which I admit has reached an almost insane extent for anyone who ' s new to JS programming or even just took a break from the front end for a couple years . but of all the languages I ' ve used so far , I still like Javascript the best . Second place would be a tie between Python , which is an elegant and useful language that I ' m hoping to get back into soon , and Ruby , which really is a VERY developerfriendly language .