Still not sure.
Let alone the question of what I might do if or when I pick up programming again. Let alone the question of why I'm doing this. Why.
"Why" is a question I can at least fake an answer to. I need something to engage my mind and give me a reason to keep breathing. I don't need the money. I have money. I'm OK there. But once you get to a place where you don't need to do anything, you find out that you still need to do it — anything. You need something.
And maybe I'll resharpen and refine my skills and then do something worthwhile. (Maybe!) And maybe not, but I'll have things do learn and to do, which all of us need.
I guess the rule is that when you get old enough you pick a project that you can't possibly finish in your lifetime, and then you're set. You stop worrying, because there is always something that needs to be done and it's right there. You chose it. It's waiting, always waiting, and you either get back to it and work on it or you do nothing.
Doing nothing is not an option. Humans can't do that.
Take the discussion about whether people with income supplements will suddenly turn lazy, watch TV all day, and do nothing else but eat snacks and drink beer. Maybe.
We have a couple of good examples to go by here.
Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, taking alternating turns as the world's richest person. Bezos in particular. He's so lazy that he's had to hire hundreds of thousands of people to do his work for him. Similarly with Musk, though his work is less labor-intensive. He doesn't need to hire so many. He focuses on the smartest ones, but still needs lots of them.
Right then. Lazy like that.
I have the luxury of deciding what I want to do with the rest of my life, but the need to do something. Just like Jeff and Elon. Jeff, Elon, and Dave — buddies in adventure. All desperate to find meaning in life. That's where I am.
They say that the language you first used to learn programming colors your attitude on which languages are right to use ever after. I learned Pascal.
Lately I've looked into Pascal, Modula-2, Oberon, and Ada. All good languages, all gone sideways. In some cases there are decent and modern environments available, on Windows. But mostly not even there. We're talking niche products for special purposes, especially with Ada and Pascal.
They're used some places, for some purposes, but not even those are fully-rounded, full-usable, up to date tools.
Clojure looks interesting but is closely tied to the Java environment. Racket is supposedly good though it looks goofy. Do I need to learn a whole new, confusing, convoluted syntax? Probably not.
So I'll take a serious look at Python, start learning it soon. Probably the closest to the sort of language I feel comfortable with. Seems to have all the tools. Seems to be easy to install and begin using, unlike Ruby/Ruby on Rails. The latter is fine and fun and I like it, but hellish to install and keep updated, especially for use with an environment like Heroku, which is a separate full-time job in itself.
Maybe Python will work.
I've got nothing to lose anyway, do I?
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Me? Wondering, always wondering.