Maybe the reason there aren't as many of us greybeards is that many of us passed through high school and college without ever having the chance to take a programming course.

In (civil) engineering school we had none, but there was an amusing pass/fail course in 2nd year in which each week you had 3 hours to write a program (on an Apple II) to implement some trivial calculation (e.g. plotting the bending moment diagram for a bridge as a truck passes over it). While I'd been fiddling with computers for years by then, the majority found it very difficult, and I still fail to see what it was to achieve apart from making neophytes into computerphobes.

I also recall a course in first year that had us doing a bit of Fortran IV on a PDP-11 via VC-404s, and from my observation it was just a way to justify new terminals as my classmates pretty well destroyed those 404s out of rage over the term.

(my hair is greying but my moustache ain't - go figure)

(ob. Cadfael comment: now replaying on CBC at midnight IIRC, great fun!)