I disagree that it would necessarily take that long. Per the OP, his father is not starting from scratch, and has some programming in his background. Being a CEO, CCO, etc... We can assume his father is an intelligent and successful person.

Possibly, if his father applied himself, he could find himself a niche in which he would be adequately competent within 2 years. To include being a freelancer or independent developer.

As you alluded to, because of his father's business background, he might do really well in sales for a software related company or starting his own business.

I know the OP said it was "maybe Pascal or Basic", but having done this ~40 years ago, I'd argue that it is basically starting from scratch, unless he was actually writing Javascript the whole time for google sheets integrations

> Being a CEO, CCO, etc... We can assume his father is an intelligent and successful person.

Being unable to continue working as a CEO/CCO suggests he's not currently very successful, and to put it lightly, CEO "intelligence" (whatever that means) doesn't necessarily translate to the kind of intelligence necessary for software engineering

Ya for sure, that's what people don't understand. It takes years to really be up to speed and really useful (maybe you can shortcut it with bootcamps, idk, I suspect not though but maybe you would know enough to be good for some tasks).

I had a friend ask me same thing as OP. He was 50, out of work at the time (had been in a trade before) and wondered if he could get into programming. I don't want to discourage anyone from learning to program because you can do a lot of cool stuff, but to be seriously industry useful isn't a matter of months and a few online classes but rather some dedicated years.

And (this might be an unpopular opinion) it's much harder if you don't natively think a certain way. Some otherwise smart people find programming pure torture and the chance of them going through the years needed is pretty low.