I've been out of it for 30 years, and I have to dive back in. The hardware is amazingly fast compared to 1990, and as I frequently note, GIT makes a huge difference in being able to refactor, compared to a folder full of ZIP files.

The frustrating thing for me is that GUI development has apparently gone backwards a decade or so, with the rise of web frameworks and all the extra layers and connections between the user and the actual data.

It used to be that you could grab some components in VB6 or Delphi, and have your database prototype up and running in an hour, and make a stream of modifications as required, with the main delay being pkZIP and copying files prior to making any big changes, just in case. Compile cycles even then were in the 0.5-5 second range, like now.

I've wimped out and use a GUI version of GIT and GitHub, but it is amazing to start a project, and once it's running, push commits to the internet with a single click.

The main limits I see right now are,

  My age - I'm 57

  My skillset doesn't include the Rust, Clojure, etc...

  The programming languages are less impedance matched to the human mind than they were in the past. Pascal made you type a lot of things, but that also made it far less ambiguous, and much, much easier to read and write.

I expect to wait, but not to get crushed. For me, programming is easy, except when it isn't, then its a persistence hunt for the cause of the open issue.