I'm getting up there (57) and I can safely say that I'm a better programmer I've ever been before. There are a lot of factors besides problem solving abilities, though. The foundations are always shifting, and the biggest part of the art is learning to work with constructs that other people have created for you to build your work upon. That requires a never ending willingness to take in mountains of new info, much of which seems rather arbitrary. You're basically trying to figure out what some other person had in mind when they laid that foundation. Hopefully they thought through what they were doing and left enough information behind to make it useable (questionable much of the time!) That's probably the roughest part of programming as one gets older - it does get wearysome having to learn to do essentially the same thing a different way for the hundredth time. I guess you're supposed to be in management by this age, but I still prefer it in the trenches.