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?

  • @Shareni
    1•1 month ago

    there are very few “starter” Clojure jobs; they mostly expect you to have years of experience.

    That’s because the language is made for people who wrote java for the last 10 years. It’s cool and all, but it’s horrible for learning programming when you compare it to cl or scheme. Neither of them break language uniformity and simplicity in order to accommodate java interop, while also having decades worth of excellent teaching material.

    It’s a Lisp language which is the oldest kind.

    Fortran, COBOL, ALGOL are older

    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?

    I think you’re over complicating the explanation, it’s just a different notation:

    (1 + 2 + 3) == (+ 1 2 3)

    (1 + (2 * 3)) == (+ 1 (* 2 3))

    People complain that there’s “too many parentheses”. People like to complain about dumb stuff.

    I think it’s got more to do with everything seemingly being completely different. Most languages have C-style syntax, and python is like the only popular exception. It’s like knowing only latin and having to learn cyrilic or alphabet.