How did you guys learn how to code?

As a new physics graduate student I had only written small programs in BASIC. Since my research group used Fortran 77, I self-taught from the book "Fortran 77: With Numerical Methods for Engineers and Scientists" (1992) by D. M. Etter. Later I learned Python from some O'Reilly books.

Same way any human learns anything.

Try, fail, learn what you did wrong, repeat.

In high school, I decided I wanted to try to learn to code, so I searched for "best programming language for beginners", and that told me I should give Python a try. Back then, Replit would let anyone start writing and running programs right away without making an account, so that's where I got my feet wet with writing code. Now I do it for a living.

The trick is to be humble enough to not hesitate to search online any time you don't know something. I would set myself manageable little goals for every program I wanted to write, then I would search online for any detail I was missing to make it happen. At my job now, the goals are set for me, but the process is otherwise the same.

I started out with random VB crap, then C on PIC, then Arduino, Python, vanilla JS, then reactive JS.

But I think I would have been better off starting at the highest level like most people do now. I'm sure the stuff I learned doing straight C helped me a lot somehow, but I didn't start learning anything I directly use now, until I started using high level tools and best practices.

I think I would start out with Git(Just learn VCS and use it from day 1), then Python (getting into pip, virtualenv, MyPy, etc as soon as possible), then maybe SvelteKit, to avoid spending so much time getting into ways of doing things that I never use anymore. I was writing little strings parsing utilities by hand in C and things like that, copying and pasting instead of using package management, putting significant effort into stuff that doesn't scale and then having to rewrite, and not learning about what tools are available because of probably laziness and task inertia(related to the "just use prints rather than set up an ide with a debugger" phenomena!).

Or, maybe starting with C really is better, because if I started higher level, I probably wouldn't have wanted to put much effort into the low level stuff, and that might have been an issue when encountering