Which explains your dismay at using new stuff. I'm 45, too. Fight it.
My point - which, as a 45-year-old programmer, you should have understood - was that modern languages and library repositories make a whole lot of basic work go away, so that we're working at a higher level than was possible in 1985.
I guarantee you'll end up having to write a damn string library and garbage collection - and you'll get it wrong.