I used to be a programming ninja. Back on the Commodore.
I've got the proper mindset, the ability to think procedurally, etc. (I think people who intuitively "get" programming also tend to be good at foreign language acquisition and vice versa). I've just never really had the opportunity or impetus to learn anything new in the last 25 years on that front (other than a C++ correspondence course I took).
There was an NPR piece this morning on the difficulties for manufacturing workers who have to skill up to stay employable in a automated manufacturing environment, and one of the people they interviewed summed it up beautifully:
"It's having to make a choice between paying your bills or having a future." (in that she didn't have the time, between work and being a single mother, to get the education she'd need to be up-to-date and employable).
I know this feeling way too well, because I'm on both sides of it. When I got laid off in 2006, I chose the "have a future" option by taking out a $30k student loan and getting my Master's Degree (while becoming a father). That gamble failed to pay off, and now we're paying for it in the form of tens of thousands of dollars of debt to pay off. Now part of me would really love to go back and get a Ph.D. and/or intensive Mandarin training, but with two kids, a mortgage, and that student loan to pay off -- it's just not feasible. We're creating a society where you need kind of a crazy amount of education to really be competitive in finding a good job, but making that education prohibitively expensive and increasing the other financial pressures on people to lessen the chance they can afford to get that education.