I am almost the age of your dad and I have been a professional software engineer since 1986. In the first years I worked with Pascal (VAX-Pascal and Turbo-Pascal.) From 1990, I mostly used C and C++. The last two years I have been working with C#. Now that I am getting a bit older, I noticed that it takes me more time to get know a developing environment and all the libraries/packages that go with it. It is a big leap from knowing how to develop an excel sheet to, for example, develop a website with a database backend. I am always happy to have younger colleagues who are good at setting-up a development environment. Also being an efficient software developer is much more than knowing how to program.
Taking longer to get up to speed and setting up a development environment: I'm not sure that's a function of age. It's more likely because development environments truly have gotten larger and more complicated over time.
I've been programming for 20 years - the amount of environment / config / tooling stuff to deal with just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
