I learned at 43. Got my first developer job at 44. This description rings true for me.

Persistence in the face of frustrations along with an actual enjoyment of creating things with code is what got me through.

Programming seems like it would be a dreadful job for someone who didn't get some satisfaction out of typing code and then watching as your code does stuff. Definitely not for everyone.

In my case, I didn't start out wanting to learn programming. I wanted to create a web site for a business idea I had. To do that, I started learning javascript and python. Pretty soon I realized that I was much more interested in learning more about programming and web development than I was about my business idea and that I'd rather get paid by someone else with a business idea to write some code.