I just wanted to say "maximum respect." I am the same age and I think it is really cool that you would even consider going back to school. If it is a possibility, I would definitely go, although that might be my heart talking much more than my head.
Every once in a while I go out for beers after work with some of the guys that I know, and almost always there is somebody asking what the "next one" technology is; the one that is somehow going to carry him until retirement. That could be practical thinking, but absolutely nothing makes me sadder to hear. We live in a golden age, an age where great ideas and phenomenal code literally flows freely around us. Our generation was lucky enough to live through the dotCom boom and see endless opportunities, and now we are 15 years from age 65 with so many languages and paradigms out there that I fear I will never have enough time to learn them all, even in a cursory way.
Go back to school. Be the guy that does every exercise in SICP, TAs the course in data mining, and can still tell the guys in your study group what it was like to edit Pascal on a DECwriter II.
I wonder how many people on HN have actually touched a VT-100? Or an 8 inch floppy disk? Or how about removable platter 10 MB hard drives the size of a washing machine?
I did, all three of them. And I punched programs on cards, and debugged them thru batch listings and memory dums coming back two or three hours later :-)
Every once in a while I go out for beers after work with some of the guys that I know, and almost always there is somebody asking what the "next one" technology is; the one that is somehow going to carry him until retirement. That could be practical thinking, but absolutely nothing makes me sadder to hear. We live in a golden age, an age where great ideas and phenomenal code literally flows freely around us. Our generation was lucky enough to live through the dotCom boom and see endless opportunities, and now we are 15 years from age 65 with so many languages and paradigms out there that I fear I will never have enough time to learn them all, even in a cursory way.
Go back to school. Be the guy that does every exercise in SICP, TAs the course in data mining, and can still tell the guys in your study group what it was like to edit Pascal on a DECwriter II.