For many years, I worked on the periphery of the programming world, but with a very superficial level of programming knowledge. I was a "webmaster" back in the

For many years, I worked on the periphery of the programming world, but with a very superficial level of programming knowledge. I was a "webmaster" back in the mid 90s, working with simple PHP, JavaScript and VB scripts. I then went to grad school for public health and afterwards worked in several biostat-oriented research analyst roles focusing on Stata and SPSS programs. All these jobs definitely involved a very basic understanding of programming, but I had no understanding of many important fundamental programming concepts, and had created very few programs bigger than a 1-page script. It was only when I started to learn Python, and then C (to write Python extensions), that everything really clicked. Something about Python made it so much easier than PHP or JavaScript for me. I think Python's relative lack of glyphs, brackets, and other "syntactic noise" (my opinion only) made it much easier for me personally to grasp big picture ideas. Python also prepared me for learning C to a pretty good level (with much help from the K&R book). These two, in turn, gave me a good foundation for branching out into other languages, eventually including functional programming languages. But Python was with no doubt the turning point for me, and even though I do little Python work these days (ironically, I'm back to JS but at a much higher level than in the 90s), I'll always be grateful for Python. If you've struggled with programming and haven't given Python a shot, give it a try! If that doesn't work, maybe try Pyret like this post advises (once it's stable), or maybe some lisp such as Clojure. I also know some mathematicians who struggled initially with imperative programming but then thrived with Haskell. Point is, we think in different ways, so keep trying different approaches until something sticks.