I don’t think a pirate being as young as 12 would have been impossible, so they could be in their 50s too.

Huh. TIL. I always wondered why libraries treat ebooks like physical books.

See Rich Cook’s Wizardry series. It’s about software engineers transported to a fantasy world and they start approaching magic as software. They create complex spells out of lots of smaller spells, they even create a debugger demon.