Start learning at 50
I’ve always wanted to learn programming. I’ve read a blog post saying that at this age it was to late . Then I read a post here in saying the opposite. I’ve found a site that was learn x in y minutes where it has a bunch of languages there. After reading them, the languages that caught my attention were Julia, Clojure and Go. Are any of these good for a beginner or should I start with something else? I know what are variables, can spot an if/else statement but that’s about it. What are some good resources for someone like me who likes to learn by doing things?
Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.
I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.
Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.
Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.
The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.
Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.
You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.