So can you teach an early forty something programmer new languages? The answer is simple. If you want to stay at the top of your game, competitive and innovate, you must.
I'm a self-taught programmer and over the years I've had to learn many different programming languages, some more fluently than others. These days my primary scripting languages are CSS, HTML, PHP, and JavaScript. I use XML for moving data between applications and for clients. On the command line Perl is still at the top of my list. For my web crawlers I use Java.
None of the above languages is out of date, however to stay at the top of ones game you have to adapt. Hence why I've decided to dig deep into Ajax, a mainstay of the new net buzz "Web 2.0" and Ruby, an up and coming language. Ruby is not new, at least not to Asia and Japan in particular where it originated, but it is relatively new in North America.
I should point out that Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Since neither JavaScript or XML is new, the learning curve there isn't great, and since Ruby is very Java like, it too shouldn't be too bad.
To handle programming in all of the languages I'm now down to two IDE's (integrated development environment) and one editor. I wish I could get down to one, but reality is that's hard. For quick html or web editing I use the editor BBEdit, for AppleScript, Widgets and Apple projects I use XCode and my newest and probably most important IDE which I use for programming in Java and Ruby is IntelliJ Idea,with TeamCity for collaboration. IntelliJ is also useful for perl, php and html as well as working with plugins such as Google's Web Toolkit.
So while I've had to learn new languages and techniques at least it hasn't been as arduous as it could have been because much of what's new is based on what I've already been using.
At some point I'd like to get into National Instrument's Labview for other types of programming but that will have to wait.