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On finally learning to program at the age of 40

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Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#2
The hard part here is getting a curriculum to learn software engineering. Writing code is much much more then just a language. So much time spent on that. Just learn one freaking language and move on.

eg. I started with Basic -> QW Basic -> Pascal -> PHP -> Perl -> ruby -> golang and a lot of others languages too.

Writing code is not the hard part.

follow something like this: https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum/

Or if you want to be something specifc follow this and find resources to learn about the topics: https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#3
post #2

The hard part here is getting a curriculum to learn software engineering. Writing code is much much more then just a language. So much time spent on that. Just learn one freaking language and move on. eg. I started with Basic -> QW Basic -> Pascal -> PHP -> Perl -> ruby -> golang and a lot of others languages too. Writing code is not the hard part. follow something like this: https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum…

Also https://missing.csail.mit.edu.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#4
post #2

The hard part here is getting a curriculum to learn software engineering. Writing code is much much more then just a language. So much time spent on that. Just learn one freaking language and move on. eg. I started with Basic -> QW Basic -> Pascal -> PHP -> Perl -> ruby -> golang and a lot of others languages too. Writing code is not the hard part. follow something like this: https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum…

You can also realistically learn Swift and then never have to write anything else again, until iOS stops being a career at least.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#6
post #4
post #2

The hard part here is getting a curriculum to learn software engineering. Writing code is much much more then just a language. So much time spent on that. Just learn one freaking language and move on. eg. I started with Basic -> QW Basic -> Pascal -> PHP -> Perl -> ruby -> golang and a lot of others languages too. Writing code is not the hard part. follow something like this: https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum…

You can also realistically learn Swift and then never have to write anything else again, until iOS stops being a career at least.

People used to think the same thing about Objective C

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#7
post #4
post #2

The hard part here is getting a curriculum to learn software engineering. Writing code is much much more then just a language. So much time spent on that. Just learn one freaking language and move on. eg. I started with Basic -> QW Basic -> Pascal -> PHP -> Perl -> ruby -> golang and a lot of others languages too. Writing code is not the hard part. follow something like this: https://functionalcs.github.io/curriculum…

You can also realistically learn Swift and then never have to write anything else again, until iOS stops being a career at least.

To the commenter's point though, Swift is the relatively easy part. UIKit throws you into the deep end right away, it descends from AppKit from native Mac app development and doesn't try to progressively disclose complexity like SwiftUI.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#8
post #6
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also realistically learn Swift and then never have to write anything else again, until iOS stops being a career at least.

People used to think the same thing about Objective C

Yes, just as Flash/ActionScript. At a time, we almost believed Flash Player was everyone on the Internet.

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#9

Wow wasn’t expecting this to climax with Rust

Yeah that's quite an interesting take. This is the first time I've seen someone come into programming with their first real learned language being Rust. I'll be awesome to see more of this in the future. It gives me encouragement to properly learn Rust as well (my problem with learning languages is that I never actually want to write anything in any language so I can't actually learn the language without finding a use for it).

Re: On finally learning to program at the age of 40

#10
The Logo screenshot used in this article was created by me for my own blog post here: https://susam.in/blog/good-quality-dosbox-video-capture/ :-)

I contributed this image to Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_LCSI_Logo_Circles.png, so that it could be added to the Wikipedia article on Logo at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language).

It is fun to see this image being reused in this article!

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24405420

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