Start learning at 50

eerongal, 28 days ago

What are you looking to actually do with your programming skills? That will heavily influence which languages to recommend you learn. Do you want to make websites? build games? do AI stuff? Create enterprise-level software? something else?

OhmsLawn, 28 days ago

This is always the question that trips me up.

I’m 5 years younger than OP. I work in a municipal transportation power system job (we maintain and control the grid for trains, trolleys, etc.). I’m sure I’m wasting all sorts of effort in my professional life. I have time. I got a lot out of learning Power Automate. However, if you ask me to pick one specific project, I get overwhelmed because I don’t know what’s reasonable.

I don’t know enough to know if my ideas are achievable, or if I’d just be bashing my head against the wall. I don’t know if they’re laughably simple tasks, multimillion-dollar propositions, or Goldilocks ideas that would be perfect to learn a coding language.

eerongal, 28 days ago

However, if you ask me to pick one specific project, I get overwhelmed because I don’t know what’s reasonable.

I don’t know enough to know if my ideas are achievable, or if I’d just be bashing my head against the wall. I don’t know if they’re laughably simple tasks, multimillion-dollar propositions, or Goldilocks ideas that would be perfect to learn a coding language.

List out some ideas you’re thinking of. While it may not be obvious to you, someone who is seasoned (me or someone else) might notice at least a general theme or idea to point you in the right direction for where you should go and what you should learn, regardless of if the projects are reasonable.

Note - Most projects take teams to realize, so if your ideas are too large, they might not generally be feasible alone.

Shareni, 28 days ago

Julia, Clojure and Go. Are any of these good for a beginner or should I start with something else?

That totally depends on what you want to do.

Go should be easiest since it’s purposefully simplified in order to make learning it easier. There are some more difficult concepts, but the start should be easy enough. I know about go with tests, but it’s not really programming beginner friendly.

I’d avoid clojure as a beginner. It’s more for people who know java, but don’t want to write java. Common lisp and schemes are good for learning programming, but they’re not a popular group of languages and that can be a problem.

breadsmasher, 28 days ago

Its never too late to start learning something! I am sure you are well aware of your learning rate and how it changes as you get older but that doesn’t mean you cannot learn at all.

As a beginner, often Python is recommended as a simpler language to pick up and start learning.

Do you have a goal in mind with what you want to learn? Learning to write code in general is fine, but if you have an idea in mind that you want to program, different languages maybe a better starting point. For example if you want to build a web app browser based, id suggest learning front end tools like javascript. Whereas if its a desktop app you want to build, python would work well.

Or maybe you want to just learn programming as a concept without any specific goals in mind beyond how stuff works?

1boiledpotato, 28 days ago

Julia, Clojure and Go

From these 3 I think Go is the most straightforward and similar to most industry standard languages.