Across this vast Fediverse, I have encountered a trend of people answering questions with esoteric programming language speaking in tongues that I don’t understand, including under my own posts. I am a Boomer when it comes to coding and I am only 27. I don’t even know where I would start to learn it because programming is so diverse. I want to feel like I know what’s going on but I don’t. Coding is the future and the future is now and I am lagging severely behind. I guess I’m asking where a bumbling novice like me can learn more about where to start when it comes to programming.
My biggest problem is figuring out what I want to do with any coding skills. I have none, by the way, and I don’t even know where to start.
Some of the usual responses when I state this:
“Automate your work” - I work in Salesforce. Have you seen Salesforce? I’m not a multi faceted systems administrator constantly updating DNS records or working in Active Directory.
“Write a cool app” - What cool app? What is “cool”?
“Open dev tools and look around” - Why? Specifically, why?
Also, learning programming is BORING. Most of the courses I’ve tried are so so stale and they aaallll end up explaining concepts in the same way.
“This is a fleeble and it holds the sping, the sping tells the plus plus that it must do what the herbug says”.
k.
I’m somewhat of a programmer, but there’s ideas everywhere in life. My bank came out with an API so I built an app that pulls it all down, stores it in a database, and makes some pretty graphs. Had no experience in fullstack or backend development before (I’m a sysadmin/cloud engineer), so it took me a really long time and I was following a course but adapting it to my project for a lot of it.
The other day I picked up an old game (Mu online) that is soooo grindy it even gives you an in-game bot to play for you, but if you die you just respawn in a safe zone. So I’ve started writing a script that reads the screen (character position is shown in x, y coordinates on screen), and those coordinates are within a given area (the safe zone) it will alert me. Again, had no experience with any of the window controls or image to text conversion (tesseract), but got chatgpt to help me a bit. Will it save me time? Maybe a little. Will I stop playing this game in a month? More than likely. Did I learn something? Absolutely.
I’m self taught but working in tech there’s obviously more work related use cases to actually start learning, but there’s every-day stuff you can do too.
Then it’s not for you. No shame in that. I don’t understand the notion that everyone is supposed to be a coder now.
If anything, the low-level coding part is something AI models may well make obsolete relatively soon. Unlike any craftsmanship - why not learn masonry or carpentry instead?
Honestly, why learn programming then?
I’m asking this as a programmer myself. I’m not trying to discourage you from learning it by any means, if that’s what you want to do. I’m just asking because it doesn’t sound as if you actually want to do it.
You’ve already tried learning it, and it’s a slog (whereas for me, I was immediately fascinated by it when I was introduced to it as a teenager, even though I was horrible at it). You don’t have any burning desires to create apps (whereas for me, there are so many ideas I want to explore, so many things I want to create that don’t exist yet, but alas I don’t have enough time or energy to work on it all). You don’t even have the desire to do it for purely career-related purposes, which is what I’d imagine drives most of the rest of people learning programming without enjoying it at all.
So why bother with learning something you neither enjoy nor have strong motivations to do?