I am going to tell a real story about someone that I know to refute the general conception that "You are too old to learn new tricks". He is a friend of mine.

I am going to tell a real story about someone that I know to refute the general conception that "You are too old to learn new tricks". He is a friend of mine. He was a jazz drummer when he was young and a professional recording engineer. He only has a GED but he has been self educating himself all his life. He masters logical reasoning more that most C.S. students due to his love for philosophy. And he has two kids to raise. He wanted to learn computer programming and he went to a tech school like Chubbs institute. His first programming language is Cobol at the beginning in 1998. He was close to his 40th birthday then. But he wrote all exercises and was a responsible student. Then he learned C/C++ and all sorts of Microsoft Windows programming skills. He event wrote programs in his spare time just for fulfilling his curiosity about chaos theory, cellular automata and all sort of things. He is now a very excellent software engineer in his 50s in building Windows applications for his employers. Though he is not as well versed in Algorithms like those fresh out of school Ph.D. in CS. But he is capable of fumbling out pretty good algorithms after he worked through some basic algorithms, operating system concepts textbooks and grasped the essentials. Back to your question: I think it is never too late to learn programming. But consider your story, you have some business concern I need to address: So if you have time to spend, you definitely can learn a skill to materialize your vision. But if you really think your idea is a "if you don't do it now then some else will do it sooner or later". Then you may need help from others. The dilemma is you have no idea what others is doing unless you have done it yourself! So you will have higher overhead in communicating out your ideas to others and vice versa. And because you don't know the skill, it will also be hard for you to evaluate your partners.