Programming

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?

Julia, Clojure and Go

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

I'm 48. Last year, during a period of unemployment, I decided that to kill time I wanted to create a 3D aircraft model for my flight simulator (X-Plane). I had dabbled in Blender in the past, but nothing too in depth. So I sat down and just did it.

Some of the features I wanted to implement required plugins that had to made with Lua (a programming language) so again...I just did it.

Age and learning have nothing to do with each other. Regardless of the topic. I feel like maybe the only valid reason that such ideas took hold is because the older we get, the less time we have to focus on learning new things, and so it can seem as though we can't learn, when in reality we just don't have the time to. That's certainly what I found to be the case personally. It wasn't until I had literally nothing else to do that I could focus on really learning 3D Modelling and basic programming.

The solution to that, that I found, was to be project based. I wouldn't have made as much progress if I didn't specifically have some thing I wanted to make, whether that's an app, a 3D model, or whatever.

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?

It is never too late to learn something like this. Especially now when there are so many resources that can help you to learn it. It is another story if you want to find a job as a programmer, because I think the majority of companies prefer to hire younger talents.

Python is an excellent choice for a beginner.

Good luck and keep going!

Python is suitable for beginner and is also easy to write code in different fields. I'm a developer, half of my time is writing code to get things done, and the other half is learning more development techniques, which I've been learning for over twenty years.

Lots of great advice here. NEVER too old to learn.

Check this out, if you're interested. Excellent free course to help you learn how to learn:

Learning How to Learn: Powerful mental tools to help you master tough subjects

I'm a big proponent of life-long learning. Never let anyone tell you that you shouldn't learn something. Do you know what types of things you would want to write a program to do? It's easier if you have a goal in mind as it will provide a motivation as well as specific things to learn since "programming" is a rather large topic.

Clojure, Julia and go are very different languages. Of the three "go" is probably the most popular and would likely have a lot of resources available for learning. Python is also a very popular and "beginner friendly" language since it's interpreted and you can run scripts without the need for compiling them. But they're all fine languages so if you're drawn to one go for it. There are many concepts that are simply "language agnostic" so if you learn one language it will be easier to switch to another language later. You're not going to be locked in. That said Clojure will be the most different from the others you've listed. It's a so-called "functional language" which has a different approach from non-functional languages. This is not a criticism, just an FYI. Though functional languages do tend to be "less popular" generally but with a core of people who simply love them. Your mileage may vary.

And there is an important point to make here - programming is about more than learning languages. There are many concepts that you'll want to learn as well that are used when programming. "Object Oriented" programming, the aforementioned "functional programming", various data structures (lists, maps, arrays, etc.). many algorithms for things like sorting, searching, etc. The list goes on. To start with you'll want to learn simple data types (numbers, strings, probably dates) and data structures (lists, maps, arrays). Then move to more complex data structures ("structs", classes, queues, etc.).

Once you've selected a language you'll want to consider a development environment. What will you write code with, how will you run it, etc. Often some sort of IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is useful as it will provide many tools that assist in running your code. There are sometimes different IDEs for different languages, and some that support many languages. VSCode is a flexible option that is free, IntelliJ is another good option but is commercial (though with a "community edition" that is free). You can always ask here about tooling.

These days I would start out with an AI helping you. AI's get a lot of crap for "sometimes generating bad or non-working code" but they can be extremely helpful as a learning aide and for explaining concepts, code, etc. They're infinitely patient and provide near-instant response. I've been coding for, well, we'll just say "some time" but even I've found AIs very helpful when learning a new language. You can directly ask it "what's that '?:' thing on line 4?" and get a good quick response vs. trying to google "?:" without knowing it's called "the elvis operator". Some AIs are better at coding than others and they're getting better almost daily. If you've sat for an hour trying to figure out why something isn't working chances an AI can often provide some guidance and keep you from getting too frustrated.

Edit: One thing I should add is that you will find many people with very strong opinions in the programming community. These opinions can be about which languages are good, what editors you should use, etc. Take any guidance that "X sucks" or "avoid Y" with a grain of salt. Best to ignore them completely and look for people who have more reasoned responses.

I graduated in CS alongside a guy in his fifties. He's now retired, but he had easily 10-15 years as a software engineer, and was the lead of a group at a large company before he retired, so I assume it all went well for him.

If you want to learn something, do it. if you want to do it professionally, do it.

Find a computer problem that you want to solve and focus on technologies that will help you solve it. Traditionally python is considered an excellent learning language due to the wide library support and adherence to most common programming styles - is there any romanticized pet project you've got on your brain?

Honestly you'll find more beginner resources for Python than anything else and it's worth learning because it's used everywhere. Lua is also extremely beginner friendly (even if it has some bad habits like 1 indexed arrays.)

If you've got a math background LISP is a good place to start as well, particularly the old MIT/UCB Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) book, that was the start of a formal CS education before python took off.

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.

Pascal was designed for beginners, so I'd start there. Get a handle on the basics before you move onto something which is using object-oriented programming, as that's a whole thing to understand in itself. One step at a time (I'm a teacher, and we always only teach students one concept at a time). And once you've got the basics then C# in a Nutshell series of books (one for each version of C# as new features come out) is very good with explaining the next level stuff and not rehashing the basics (there may be similar books available for other languages, but that's outside my area of expertise).

I think the idea you stop learning/can no longer learn past a certain age is rather stupid.

I think its a misconstrued fact, but the brain is always learning, I think the actual fact is its easiest to learn as a younger child, but I'd argue that is just due to not having knowledge already and not having any habits etc.

If you want to learn programming go for it! There's lots of very good resources online.

A language like python is very flexible and syntax wise is made to read close to natural language/English :)

I'm around the same age as you, and I taught myself front end development. Don't let anyone say you can't learn. If you want to make websites, I suggest HTML => CSS => JavaScript => React.js. I recommend learning on Scrimba.com. They have a screen cast system where an actual instructor tells you what to do in plain English with the corresponding code on screen. If you want to see how a change would affect the code, you can pause the cast and run the code yourself.

And if you want to learn back end, a back end programmer suggested learning PHP. Still in high demand in the job market.

Kotlin is a really nice language with plenty of users, good tooling support, gets rid of a lot of the boilerplate that older languages have, and it instills many good practices early on (most variables are immutable unless specified otherwise, types are not nullable by default unless specified otherwise, etc)

But to get the most "bang for your buck" early on, you can't beat JavaScript (with TypeScript to help you make sense of your codebase as it keeps changing and growing).

You will probably want to develop stuff that has some user interface and you'll want to show it to people, and there is no better platform for that than the web. And JS is by far the most supported language on the web.

And the browser devtools are right there, an indispensable tool.

Never too old to learn. I think Python is a great beginner language. It has fairly broad applications, and easy to set up an environment (don't have to download/install a thousand things, you just install python and can run the text files in terminal). I also learned by doing starting in late middle school/early high school. I always found YouTube videos to be the most engaging way to get started. I used to like thenewboston. Once I had a handle on the basic programming language, I would do easy programming challenges where you have to solve some sort of basic problem. The challenges helped me learn basics like taking in input, changing the input based on the various rules and conditions of the challenges, then outputting the proper results formatted in the right way. Also helped me to think about algorithms, etc. After that, I started learning programming through a textbook. This was helpful for understanding some of the more technical aspects, basics of memory management, what different variable types are really for, OOP, abstraction, algorithms etc. I found that leaving these advanced topics till after I had a working understanding of the programming language helped understand the concepts better, and helped me understand why it's important to learn the concepts in the first place. I was using Java for learning most of this, which might also be a good place to start for you, but I feel like python has simpler syntax to start with. In the end once you learn one language, I recommend learning more and not being stuck to any particular language. Every language has it's own strengths and weaknesses, and understanding the commonalities and differences will only make you better in the long run.

Edit - now I use Go, python, JavaScript, R, Java, Julia, rust based on what I'm actually doing. It's fairly easy to switch languages once you get used to basic syntax.

Its only too late if its for a career change since you really need to be safe about income and retirement (notto mentions age discrimination). Still could help you in your day job to automate tasks. If you like math puzzles then coding them is a nice hobby too! Learning is always worth it in my opinion.

I don't know Julia, but Clojure and Go use two different programming paradigms (functional vs imperative). They are two different ways to think about programming. Which one you pick depends on what you feel comfortable with.

What I'd recommend is to find a free, online course or tutorial for the languages you'd like to learn and just give a go!

• https://exercism.org/ has free courses for many languages contributed by volunteers. quality can vary per language
• https://www.codecademy.com/catalog proprietary but has a free Go course of a few hours to get your feet wet

Otherwise, Python is quite the easy language to learn first. It's nearly as if someone wrote pseudo code on a napkin and said "this should be able to run on my PC".

Anti Commercial-AI license

What are some good resources for someone like me who likes to learn by doing things?

Have small project ideas that match your skill. Search the project ideas or ask an A.I for ideas, good luck!

People look down on Javascript (and therefore Typescript) but as someone who learned by doing I think its a really good option

Once you get past the hello world phase you can take it any direction you want: websites/apps, command-line stuff, desktop apps you name it. Just avoid the trap of getting sucked into specific frameworks or loads of tooling early on and learn the language

W3schools is a great resource and you can do the examples and exercises right there in your browser

It's always worthwhile to learn new things!

And programming is a tool, so it's typically made to be clear how to use it, although of course people will differ on what needs to be clarified the most.

My experience is that there's way too much discussion in what tool to pick, it doesn't matter that much and almost all of the common languages will allow you to do all the things. And even though some will be better adapted for certain applications, it's easy to pick up the new tool when relevant, and you'll be that much ahead by being well versed in one.

As for how to learn, I find that you kind of need to figure out the basic syntax in each language (loops, conditionals, output, memory management, typology, lists, function calling, maybe classes/libraries if you're fancy), and then start doing projects.

A nice intro for C# is the C# Player's Guide by R B Whitaker, using some gamification and storytelling to get you through the basics, and even leave you prepared to tackle your first projects (by practicing design philosophy, how to break down projects, etc).

Otherwise, Python is a lot of fun, it's made to be very easy to jump into, and then it's fully featured to do anything you'd like it to. Unfortunately all my resources for it are in my local language, but it has many many users so I'm sure there's great resources to be found in your own language.

I'd actually recommend to start with C#, it's the perfect balance from complexity and simplicity, so you don't miss out on certain learning curves.

Clojure is an interesting language that will improve the way you work and think with other languages. A passionate community, but there are very few "starter" Clojure jobs; they mostly expect you to have years of experience.

I don't think anyone could go with doing the "Clojure For The Brave And True" book which is online and available in dead-tree form. I liked it so much, I bought the book.

It's a Lisp language which is the oldest kind. Instead of "object oriented", I think if it as verb oriented. Each statement is a verb (function) possibly followed by all the nouns you want to apply it to. Easy peasy, right?

People complain that there's "too many parentheses". People like to complain about dumb stuff.

Go is a good bet for first language.

Out of the ones you listed I'd suggest Julia or Clojure. They are simple and have interactive modes you can use to experiment easily.

Experienced programmers often undersell the value of interactive prompts because they don't need them as much. They already have a detailed mental model of how most languages behave.

Another thing: although Julia and Clojure are simple, they are also quite obscure and have very experimental designs. Python might be a better choice. From a beginner's perspective it's very similar to Julia, but it's vastly more popular and lots of people learn it as their first language.

Based on the languages you found, I'm guessing you were looking for something simple and elegant. I think Python fits this description too.

Age is not a factor. Your ability to learn is

nah, one is never to old to learn stuff.

a tough, but hands-on start would be something like https://www.theodinproject.com/

it's a free course for web development and their material is really good, so even if you don't finish it you'll aquire some good fundamentals about programming.

sadly that does not match your language preferences, but a lot of knowledge tends to transfer or helps to understand different approaches.

you could also try a course like Introduction to CS and Programming or other university/college courses. they are meant for people who start without programming experience.

I've had some students who started at 50. The biggest problem is that it is hard to find a junior position as a 50 year old. Age discrimination is definitely a thing. If your goal is to make a career in programming from scratch, you might be too late, but 30 is sometimes already too late in that regard. Networking, nepotism and the good old "foot in the door" helps there. If your goal is just to learn and maybe apply it to your current job or your own business, than it's perfect to start now.

Most succesful students I've seen of the older category are those that have drive and passion. One student had her own fotography studio and wanted to build a database and website for that. She struggled a lot, but persevered and made a great application. Another was a taxi driver who's children put him in the course. He turned out to be very talented and made and excelllent application for planning taxi rides as his final project.

So it depends what your goals are.

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.

I used to know someone who learnt Dutch from age 60, and granted he's very sharp, but if he can do that, I'm sure you can do this.

I've been in the tech industry for about 12 years and learned my first programming language about 30 years ago. The choice of language really will depend on the sort of things that you want to do. That said, if choosing one of the three listed, I'd say Go with no reservation. It is a much better language for beginners than the other two as it is widely used, not esoteric, and has a C-like syntax.

I would probably recommend either Python or JavaScript as a better first language though, biased heavily towards Python because JavaScript's type system is awful (it still gets a lot done on the Internet though). Python is a great interpreted language that is very human readable. Yes, some hate that it uses whitespace for party of its syntax but there are very few footguns (don't mix tabs and spaces for indents and just don't use tabs, that's about all that isn't covered in a hello_world).