Asklemmy

As others have said, rather than learn a language, solve a problem. Find something that bothers you, and write some code to fix it. The specific language doesn't matter.

Its kinda similar to learning a spoken language, there is no point learning French if you cant use it in someway.

start with python to do what? learning a language is not the same a s learning programming. Heck most languages can be learned in an hour or two. Programming is another beast altogether.

A person can learn to use a hammer in minutes, but it doesn't make them a carpenter.

Find a project you want to build, and start building it. solve problems, and learn along the way. Learning "python" on its own will not help you learn programming in any way. Programming stuff will.

I was a self taught programmer who 10+ years later is now a senior software engineer. I can't tell you what to do but I can tell you what worked for me.

The reality is, I never sat down with the intent to "learn programming". Instead, I had practical ideas for things I wanted to make the computer do, and then I learned whatever was necessary to accomplish my projects as I went. Whenever I got stuck or hit an error, I'd search my questions online.

I never truly "finished" most of these early projects but they gave me a practical understanding of how things fit together. From there I just kept making stuff and taking on harder projects and then harder jobs and eventually other programmers started coming to me asking for help because they knew I had solved the thing they were working on before.

I'm not sure if it's advice, but I'd say stop worrying about learning and just do. If you like firmware, go buy some shitty unsupported peripheral from Goodwill and try to make it work on your modern system. Solve a problem you have in your everyday life. It doesn't matter if you accomplish the goal, you'll learn a lot by googling your way through it. Do that enough and you'll wake up one day and be a competent programmer.

I started "programming" by writing triggers in the Warcraft 3 editor 😅.

Later learned C++, then went to uni and learned more and the deeper theory.

If you're just a hobbyist, Python is a good choice. If you want to learn more deeply, I'd recommend Rust over something like C. Feel free to mention/message me if you have Rust questions.

In grade 5-6 we had a course on typing, it was boring so instead I played NIBBLES.BAS and GORILLA.BAS started modifying the Basic code to give me more lives.

Some time later I got hold of Visual Basic 3.0 and made some small programs, after that I was told that the cool kids were programming in C++ so i got hold of Borland C++ Builder 1.0 and played with it.

The latest language I learned was Python, this was when Oracle brought Sun (2009) I was fond of Java but wanted a language that was not in the clutches of a corporation, and Python was already on the rise back in 2009.

I think starting with Python is a good idea, when you get better at the language you can then add more languages like C/C++ or whatever you feel for, because when you know one programming language its easier to learn another one.

I'm genX, so I grew up with 80s microcomputers. Programming was pretty much the only thing you could do with them.

I started it via Minecraft modding. My mouse at the time couldn't handle clicking a lot well, the button got stuck a lot when I did that. I wrote a mod that would click and release when I held down the mouse, and it helped me a lot until I got another mouse.

Back in the day - it was around 2003 - I had a band and I wanted my band to have a website. That is when I installed Frontpage which let you design it with drag and drop. I had a menu which I wanted to show on each page, so I used serverside injection which Frontpage offered to do that. Later I found out that you tan even dynamically change the menu to highlight on which page you are if you do it with PHP and to a '[HTML_REMOVED]`. From there I added more dynamic things until I had some software on my hands.

But this was not the first time I got into coding actually. First time was around 1992 when my dad bought me an Amiga 500 and it came with the AMIGABasic handbook. Back then while most of my friends only used it for games, I somehow got interested in trying to make the computer do what I want. So I wrote some small games, some animations, even a book lending management program. But after some years i stopped being interested in computers until ten years later.

I learned Minecraft (and other video games) were made with coding, so I had to learn it to make my own.

I was like 8-10 and found a tutorial on how to use eclipse. I thought I followed it to the letter, but it didn't compile.

At 12, my math teacher offered python courses, so I attended them and yeah.

I started with HTML and CSS because I liked to build my own useless small websites. Then I noticed it was nice to copy+paste some javascript scripts someone else wrote into them to get some "fun" interactive components. Then I slowly started to make little changes to those scripts and that way slowly learned more and more. It was not the quickest way to learn, but the most fun, because there was little setup necessary (I literally used windows notepad to save files as .html and opened them in my browser) and I could quickly see results.

Since you're interested in FOSS I assume you use an OS with a nice terminal. You could write some bash scripts to do simple tasks for you maybe? (Maybe write a script that removes old downloads from your downloads folder, or something that can delete all files that end in '.temp' (IDK just stupid ideas that could be fun to try to start coding).

Python is a nice option as well, it has a lot of useful options and documentation and gives you very readable code, making it easier to learn good practices!

Just make sure you do something fun and you will learn what's necessary along the way.

I wanted to have a cool geocities page, so I needed some HTML. Later I wanted to do downloads and forms... maybe a domain is in order. Learned some php and javascript. Discovered desktop languages, this C# stuff is pretty neat, I can do a lot with it. It's versatile. Oops now I'm getting a paycheck for this silliness, and depending on it to eat.

Someone showed me MSWLogo in high school. I figured out that I can draw cool stuff, and do calculations in it. It inspired me to learn a real programming language. C was my first language. Then a learned C++, and Python. Then I lost interest in it for a few years, got a bachelor's in math. I'm still in math, but I gradually regained some interest in programming. It started with the odd bash script I had to write from time to time. Then I had some larger problem to solve, and decided to learn Rust to do it. Turned out great, it's on GitHub with ~100 stars. Currently I mostly code in Haskell and Lean, both for non-professional hobby work.

TL;Dr: I found it fun.

I feel like you're trying to fight an uphill battle. I find it's always easiest to learn in a way that motivates or invigorates me.

For example, I wanted to play games with my friends so I got into hosting a Minecraft server. It was hell at first to learn all the individual pieces, but I was motivated and it led me down the path of learning networking, basic server client architecture, and performance monitoring. That kind of spiralled out into making my own plugin, too. Despite the fact that I never ran a server with more than 5 active players or finished my plugin, it sent me down a path learning tons of new stuff because it was fun for me.

I transitioned into webapp development later on by trying to make an idea I had come to life. This was well before I had even heard the word "startup" and I had no business sense, but I wanted to make something and was very motivated to hack my way through it. I didn't finish that either, but I still use those skills I learned today.

When I was young, around 10, I was bored. We had one shitty desktop and no internet 99% of the time (we had dial up but only 1 landline, and my mom used the phone alot). We were also homeschooled, and the software teaching us was on that computer. I found the software documentation which was in HTML, and used that to make my own "website".

Even before then though I had a draw to tinkering with computers. After a bit I convinced my mom to get me intro to C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup, and messed with that for a good year or so. Then we upgraded to DSL when I was around 13 and I got into Roblox and learned Lua, then other languages.

Got into making redstone logic in Minecraft, including joining a community of people building all kinds of crazy things like CPUs. This was early days too - I think the repeater was brand new

Eventually wanted to make mods so started learning Java. Was bad at it. Then wanted to make games in unity. Was bad at it. Learned C++ at Uni. Dropped out and was bad at it.

Kind of repeated this cycle for various languages and tools for years, never with enough motivation to learn properly. Eventually I hit a critical mass of skill and was able to actually make things in HTML/JS and over a couple years this snowballs until surprisingly quickly I find myself a senior developer teaching others!

I had a triple major of Psych/Soc/Phil with the intent of teaching. My focus in Philosophy was mostly logic and analytical reasoning. I ended up marrying my GF and had to quit college in my junior year and go to work where I ended up doing a lot of computer work on the IBM XT. One late night working on electronic bids for parts we sold I realized computers are not going anywhere and focusing on that would get me out of this sales job. I went to Control Data for a year which got me in the door of a company. Programming was nothing but logic which was my focus in college so it came pretty easy to me. That was 1989. I contracted to Ford for the next 30+ years doing everything from data analysis at the start to SQL and DB's for a while, and then I ended up on teams delivering software to the plants. I always wanted a job that would allow me to see the world and for over 20 years I traveled on the corporate dime, including an around the world trip for work in Asia and Europe on the same trip. I traveled almost 300k miles on planes during that time and had a chance to see how people live and work all over the world.

I started my career with it, studying it in college. Relying on it for finances definitely is a major push. I don't touch it for a hobby though because of that. Hopefully others can help with suggestions for that side of things.

I mean im in tech and im on a dev team but I come from ops/admin and I while I get the idea of dev ops I still don't like calling it development because I simply do not have the 10k hours of coding experience. I work with and modify files in various languages and more often than not simply configuration files that are just a format. I sorta have the same feelings as you but I know I won't really get there unless im doing it the majority of the time over the course of a few years and I doubt that is going to happen.

I had my start with Python, albeit as a kid and I didn't actually understand too much about the principles at the time. Still, I think that was a good place to start learning about the concepts of instructions and variables.

I learned more about the ideas underpinning it all later, and most of my understanding came when actually working in software development on a live and in-development codebase. I think that's a good progression: start small, then learn some theory just so you've heard the terms once, then try to make sense of actual code using that.

Edit: definitely work on some goal though. Don't code in a vacuum, think of something small you want to achieve and learn to do that.

I started learning Python in middle school and completed some projects that I wanted to make. That's how I got into programming. Now I use Rust for my hobby projects and C++ for school.

I always were fascinated by computers so it was easier for me to get into it. But if you can find something that might get you motivated to try to program, I'm certain you'll get into it.

I was undeclared but leaning towards a stats major in college - I started working with SAS and found I liked building the solutions more than figuring out the statistics of it all.

I played flash games as a kid on Newgrounds. There was an option to submit your own flash games and that made me curious as to how they were made. I searched tutorials on how to make flash games and that was my start.

Eventually I got interested in making programs outside of Flash. Still being a kid, I wanted to be the coolest programmer/hacker ever so I learned C (the only language hackers use) and intalled linux (the OS for hackers). I mostly use Python now since I can get projects done much faster.

It doesn't matter what language you start with. Just learn the core concepts around loops, if statements, data types, data structures, object-oriented programing vs functional programming. Those concepts span across all languages and once you know them you can just google "how to splice string in (language here)" when you're using a different language. C is great if you also want to learn how computers manage data and how data structures work from first principles, since in C you need to manage memory yourself and it doesn't come with any advanced data structures built in so you'll need to implement them yourself.

I now mostly use my programming knowledge for hobby stuff. I automate tasks, do programming challenges, and mod games.

The used Commodore64 my parents bought from my cousin included a book on programming in BASIC. I wrote a few games and was hooked.

From there I moved on to ZZT and its internal scripting language, making dozens more games and sharing them with friends and Internet strangers. At the same time I was teaching myself HTML from online tutorials and making my first webpages.

By the time I was in college I was writing my own blogging software and doing freelance projects for grad students who needed specialized data-processing widgets. Also learning the more mathematical side of CS like computability theory and complexity theory and graph theory, and some boring computer engineering stuff that wasn't nearly as interesting to me.

When I left college I needed a job and stumbled into teaching, first just web design and later into to CS. The senior teachers in the CS department taught me even more about both how computers really work as well as how to talk about information and the ways we use and manipulate it. I finally understood both the Fourier transform and JavaScript.

In high school a learned a bit programming but I did not like it much back then. Later on a 386 computer I discovered qbasic with nibbles.bas (snake game) and gorillas.bas. I figured out how to more lives in nibbles.bas by modifying it's qbasic. This made me more interested in programming and try write my own games in qbasic.

While I agree with a lot of the other comments with the "you learn by doing vibe", I feel like it's a bit open ended and it can be a struggle taking the first step.

I started out around 2012 with some "how to do java" tutorials, and through that learned the language agnostic basics of programming (variables, functions, arrays, loops etc). But because I had nothing I wanted to make, I dropped that pretty soon after and didn't touch anything code related for like 5 years.

I randomly applied for a job that required a whole lot of sql knowledge, got the role (when I probably shouldn't have in all honesty) and that prior knowledge helped tremendously in getting up to speed with that, I just had to learn the sql specific stuff on the go.

I then wanted to do a Pokemon Romhack, so followed tutorials on YouTube which taught me a bunch of C and git.

So yeah, it wasn't until I actually needed to use something that I actually learned any languages, and the original language I set out to learn I know absolutely nothing about now, but it did give me the baseline knowledge I needed to pick all the rest up far easier.

I've been "learning" programming for about 10 years in a self-taught way. I don't even know why I started, but it was with C, but I quit soon after when I realized I didn't understand anything. I was jumping between C#, Javascript, and other languages until I landed on Python, mainly because I wanted to learn how to use Godot, and in the documentation of the Engine it said that its language, GDScript, was very similar to Python, and my reasoning was "Ah, ok. Then if I learn Python it will be easier for me to learn GDScript". So I started learning Python and was able to create my first programs, but after a while I lost interest and forgot why I was learning it in the first place.

When the controversy with Unity happened, I don't know what happened to me but I felt a kind of wake-up call, like that was the moment to go back to Godot, and that's what I did. And while I was making my first game suddenly everything I had learned the previous years made sense, now I really enjoy programming.

I saw the video about Python from Life Of Boris and thought it looked fun, so I just decided to learn programming.

typing in Beagle Bros one-liners on an Apple ][ plus

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i did IT for a long time and the ability to program becomes a necessary evil once you reach a certain point. that coupled with the covid shortages led me to becoming a software developer.

it looks like the employment landscape is undergoing a dramatic shift again. i'm being forced to find a new job thanks to biden and developer jobs in my area dramatically fewer and insanely fiercely competitive; nothing at all like it was like during covid.