I'm one of those who bought an Apple-II at the end of the seventies. That was fun : overlaying code and data into the 16K memory changing code on the fly, peeking and poking around.

At the end of 1981 I had to learn Fortran77 and a few years later I've been testing minisupers, supermini's, transputersystems and plenty of other system. In those days I've made portable UIs. Just changing one subroutine for each system, made it possible to create forms that could be run on UNIVAC-11, (micro)VAX, IBM (3090; VM-CMS; GDDM etc), at least a dozen different unixsystems (Convex, Gould, DecUltrix, HP etc), Atari (Mega ST4) and of course PC as well (about 5 FORTRAN compilers, including Lahey, MS, Salford FTN77 etc). Software I've made in those days is still in use now !!

In the meantime I learned some other languages (Pascal, C, VBA, Smalltalk). In 1995 I started my own business active in flowsheeting.
Most of the time I worked for a single company doing the kind of work I did before, but highly payed. Conversion of models and software from unix and mac systems to PC, making GUIs, restructuring (and rewriting) software. Online gathering data from chemical plants. Solving mass- and energy balances consisting of thousands non-linear equations, using Fortran and C++, realtime displaying results in Excel in controlrooms etc.

But than something happened making it impossible for me to work anymore. After several years I recovered more or less, became MCTS (Web based Client Development) but never practised as I just didn't have the power anymore. I went away from software totally.

Only recently I felt I needed a small program for a task for the (local) political party I'm a concillor for. So I started hitting the keys again. It was fun, but showed I just don't know much anymore and I missed all technology of the last 7 years or so.
Of course, the program I needed has been finished now. But as it makes fun, I add and add functionality using Google Apps Script. It turns out GAS and also the development environment lack a lot of things. I dare to say that the Salford Fortran77 and C compilers I've used in the eighties and the early nineties are FAR better for development and Google really should provide a better environment for developers.
Apart from that, GAS lacks vital info about UI-elements. i.a. no element knows about it's children nor parents. RIDICULOUS !! Yes, it is possible to use tricks and overcome many problems, but must life be so hard??
It feels like going back in time. Even in the early days of windows programming setters AND getters have been available for almost everything and things like an itemcount for trees have been available.

Most probably I won't ever make profesional software anymore (eventhough I think I could and might accept if offered, especially on a no cure no pay base) . But from time to time I might spend some time making small programs just for fun and being interested in 'how does it work'.