15 ms·

On finally learning to program at the age of 40

302 points by Stratoscope 6y ago

toadi 6y ago
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/ 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 https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap
- Austin_Conlon 6y ago
  Also https://missing.csail.mit.edu https://missing.csail.mit.edu.
- xenihn 6y ago
  You can also realistically learn Swift and then never have to write anything else again, until iOS stops being a career at least.
  - usrnm 6y ago
    People used to think the same thing about Objective C
    - Brajeshwar 6y ago
      Yes, just as Flash/ActionScript. At a time, we almost believed Flash Player was everyone on the Internet.
      - Kwantuum 6y ago
        Isn't ActionScript just a dialect of EcmaScript? I would guess transitioning from that to Javascript would be pretty easy.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Without the nice IDE experience though.
        FormFollowsFunc 6y ago
        There was an IDE for ActionScript called FDT built on top of Eclipse.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        I meant that JavaScript/HTML/CSS has yet to offer anything similar to the Flash development experience.
        Brajeshwar 6y ago
        Well, the Flash IDE itself was a horrible compiler for those who write mostly ActionScript. We used to compile with few open source compilers. I have forgotten the names.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        It still is, https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpxflash.html https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpxflash.html
    - Austin_Conlon 6y ago
      Seems like it’s going to be many years before Objective-C is no longer viable, and there’s a lot of it to maintain (especially Apple’s). I think the only Swift-exclusive frameworks are SwiftUI, Combine, and WidgetKit.
      - Grustaf 6y ago
        It would be pretty crazy to learn only objective c today, unless you want to go after the legacy market specifically, like someone learning Cobol to get bank contracts. Maybe it suits some people but for most people it’s sad and frustrating to work with old messy systems in obsolete languages when there’s a shiny new one that’s objectively much better in almost every way.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Here is a little secret, while Swift is the future of systems programming on Apple platforms, there is still plenty of stuff written in a mix of C++ and Objective-C. In which languages do you think Core Audio and Metal are written on?
  - Austin_Conlon 6y ago
    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.
  - darksaints 6y ago
    Why would you take a bet like that with Apple trying their best to destroy the iOS market for developers?
- susam 6y ago
  > QW Basic Did you mean GW-BASIC? Or maybe QBasic? Or perhaps QuickBasic? By the way, I have archived these obsolete pieces of software from MS-DOS era at https://github.com/susam/dosage https://github.com/susam/dosage (search for Basic in the README) if anyone wants to try their hands on them again.
- yugene 6y ago
  And here's a compact list of the possible resources to use: https://teachyourselfcs.com https://teachyourselfcs.com
- tasogare 6y ago
  To some extend the engineering part is emerging: when a code base grows it becomes necessary to learn technics to factor it. What I find really time consuming when using a new language is searching for its API.
hevelvarik 6y ago
Wow wasn’t expecting this to climax with Rust
- mlindner 6y ago
  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).
  - hevelvarik 6y ago
    I’m the same way, I study other things and hope for the day to have to learn a more interesting language than the ones I’m paid to work in. But at the end of the day, taking a step back, there are a good deal of more helpful things for a professional dev to learn than languages he or she isn’t writing anything in currently.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    > (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). This also seems the author's problem. It reads like he feels he should ought to learn programming but he doesn't actually have any particular problems he wants solved.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Well, in that case on should look at existing learning materials. Maybe something like Project Euler, advent of code or a good old fashioned dead tree (book).
  - mirekrusin 6y ago
    Write those things top to bottom https://projecteuler.net/archives https://projecteuler.net/archives
susam 6y ago
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/ 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 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) 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24405420
- bartvk 6y ago
  Very nice, and it was actually properly attributed, too.
darkteflon 6y ago
I'm in this boat. Finally started programming in 2018 at age 38 after a lifetime of playing around with computers as a hobby (thanks, dad!) and a first career in a completely unrelated field, as an attorney. The linked article is about learning for pleasure, but there are also challenges associated with trying to enter the field as a second career. The technical complexity, of course, and the scale of what needs to be learned, can sometimes be overwhelming. It helps to bring as much humility to the process as you can muster. But peoples' perceptions can also be a challenge - no one quite knows what to make of you! I like to think it's an opportunity. If you're able to combine domain expertise from your first career with a solid grasp of CS fundamentals and a good day-to-day working knowledge of your toolchain, that can make you a pretty rare interdisciplinary candidate. Perhaps that then informs how you market yourself and to whom. Best of luck to anyone coming at this as a second career!
- tehlike 6y ago
  I have a friend who is an attorney that's fairly technical - he can't write code but he understands how it works when reading it. He does combine his interdisciplinary skill - started a company in his main domain using software as a tool. I'm constantly impressed by him.
- throwaway17_17 6y ago
  I thought for a moment I blacked out and posted to HN without knowing it. I too am a 38 years old attorney who learned CS/Programming late in life. I haven’t had any success in finding relevant job openings for my particular coding knowledge, but I keep looking. Just knowing you exist gives me hope I may still be able to break into tech, at some level. And given that Hurricane Laura just decimated my city ( and my home and my office) I need some hope right now.
  - eecc 6y ago
    Well, being an attorney you could dig yourself a nice rabbit hole with Lucene, a Java library for text indexing and analysis at the foundation of many Java based search engines (for example Solr, Elastichsearch.) Combine it then with your expertise to analyze documents from your business domain for example
susam 6y ago
The article mentions that Logo did not provide a very good experience to the author. I am glad to know that he still found another way back to programming and had a great time with Rust. In my life, Logo opened a whole new world for me. I began coding with IBM/LCSI PC Logo in my childhood days. The first line of code I ever wrote was: FD 100 That's the "hello, world" of turtle graphics in Logo. That simple line of code changed my world. I could make stuff happen in an otherwise mostly blank monochrome CRT display. Until then I had seen CRTs in televisions where I had very little control on what I see on the screen. But now, I had control. The turtle became my toy and I could make it draw anything on a 320 x 250 canvas. The next beautiful piece of code I came across in the same language was: REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RT 1] The code above draws an approximation of a circle by combining 360 short line segments. It showed me how control flow can be used elegantly to express complex ideas in a simple expression. And then I came across this: REPEAT 20 [REPEAT 180 [FD 1 RT 2] RT 18] The above code draws 20 overlapping circles. The output looks like this: https://susam.in/files/blog/dosbox-logo-1.png https://susam.in/files/blog/dosbox-logo-1.png. By the way, it is the same image that the author of this article has reused in his article. :-) At an impressionable age of 9, reading and writing code like this, and using simple arithmetic, geometry, logic, and code to manipulate a two-dimensional world had a lasting effect on me. Back in those days, I used to find joy in sharing some of my interesting Logo programs with my teachers and friends. I like to believe that my passion for software engineering as well as my love for writing code, sharing code, and open source development are a result of coming across these beautiful code examples early in my life.
- susam 6y ago
  For all the Logo fans out here, we have Slack and IRC channels at https://bit.ly/fd100slack1 https://bit.ly/fd100slack1 and https://webchat.freenode.net/#fd100 https://webchat.freenode.net/#fd100 . Most members of these channels are also Hacker News users. Please do join it even if you don't remember Logo anymore. The intention here is not to discuss Logo but to share the joy of computing that we discovered through Logo and has remained in our lives. I hope to see you all there. :-)
  - larsbrinkhoff 6y ago
busterarm 6y ago
Not quite the same story, but I've been programming since I was 5 or 6 years old and it took me until I was 30 to make a career out of it. Turns out everything else that I've done with computers in the meantime helped and is a force multiplier in my job.
Stratoscope 6y ago
This story was rather poignant for me, as I am, let's just say quite a bit over 40. I learned to program when I was in high school and noticed a Teletype 33 ASR in a corner of the math classroom. I knew about Teletypes from being a ham radio operator, but I thought they were just for sending and receiving text over the air or over a phone line to another Teletype. You could either connect to the other Teletype and type in real time, or you could punch a paper tape first and then send it over the air or across the wire at the full speed of 10 characters per second. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 This Teletype was special, though. The school had an account with a local timesharing computer company, and for a mere $30 per hour ($200/hour in today's dollars) you could dial in and run a BASIC program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing Naturally my first program was: 10 PRINT "HELLO" and it printed HELLO! You can probably guess the next line I added to the program: 20 GOTO 10 Whoops! This wasn't just text scrolling on a screen, it printed out line after line on the roll of Teletype paper. Had to hang up the dialup modem fast. That summer I got a job as "night operator" at the timesharing company (Transdata in Phoenix, AZ). The great thing about this job was they shut down the timesharing service at night. So I had their SDS Sigma 5 all to myself. My first personal computer! I found a copy of the Algol-60 Report and taught myself Algol. And then Sigma 5 machine language. It was great fun to see how much of a program I could write on a single punch card (80 bytes). We had a nice single-card program that you could put in front of a deck of cards to print out the whole card deck. But it was kind of slow, because it would read a card, print the card, read the next card, print that one, etc. There were a few bytes left on that print program card, so I squeezed in code for a double buffer. It would read the first card, start it printing, and then while it printed read in the next card, overlapping the reads and writes so it printed twice as fast. That fall I went to Caltech, lasted a year and flunked out. I loved science and math, but when we got to partial differential equations my mind just couldn't handle it. But there was a systems programming class, and the final project was to write an infix expression parser and evaluator with operator precedence in assembly language. I was the only person in the class to turn in a complete working program with test cases. I could probably tell you exactly where I was sitting when the instructor announced the results. I had found my calling, and have been at it ever since. My secret weapon: while everyone was punching cards with their program, submitting the batch job, and waiting hours or overnight for the core dump when it crashed, I found an interactive console on campus where I could code and run and test my program in real time. Just like the Teletype I learned on. Moving forward to the present, I interviewed with a FAANG company last week. It reminded me a bit of the discouraging experience the article's author initially had with LOGO and competitive programming. Everyone I interviewed with, and the company recruiters, were all super nice and supportive. But the gist of the interview process was to tackle four medium to hard algorithm problems and come up with not only a working solution but a perfectly optimized solution, in 15 minutes each! The recruiters advised me to spend at least an hour or two every day for two weeks on LeetCode banging through as many algorithm problems as I could, timing myself to see if I could solve each one with optimized code in that 15 minute time limit. There was also a system design interview focused on scaling out a backend system to support a billion users. I explained to the recruiter and the interviewer that this wasn't my forte, but I had a lot of experience with low level hardware interfaces and was really interested in a job in their hardware group. They don't hire for a specific role like that, though, they hire "generalist engineers", which means being able to come up with a fully optimized solution for any algorithm in 15 minutes - and without the ability to run and test your code. In fact, they used an online code editor that normally lets you do just that, but this capability was disabled. I suppose they were trying to limit the online editor to match the capabilities of what you could do scribbling code on a whiteboard. This all reminded me of what discouraged the OP's author so much about his initial foray into programming: the competitive coding competition with LOGO. That is fun for some people, but not for him and not for me. I would rather learn how to cooperate with other programmers, not compete with them. One of the algorithm problems stuck in my mind. Of course it was a LeetCode problem that you can read about here: https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-palindrome-ii/ https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-palindrome-ii/ "Given a non-empty string s, you may delete at most one character. Judge whether you can make it a palindrome." In Python, there is a simple solution for this: def is_palindrome_with_at_most_one_character_deleted( string ): if string == string[::-1]: return True for i in range( len(string) ): s = string[:i] + string[i+1:] if s == s[::-1]: return True return False If the string slice notation is unfamiliar, here are some references: https://www.google.com/search?q=python+slice+notation https://www.google.com/search?q=python+slice+notation But of course this simple solution would not be good enough. What about the time complexity? This LeetCode problem has 520,862 submissions at the moment, with 191,325 accepted. The solution above would not be accepted. There is a faster solution, but it is less obvious and prone to off by one errors and other logic errors. It's not that complicated, but not something I would expect anyone to code correctly and verify in 15 minutes. If that kind of competitive programming was what programming looked like to me, I could see myself being easily as discouraged as the OP was. Fortunately there are other fish to catch in this grand ocean of programming!
ganafagol 6y ago
Wow. So this article is just some clueless non-programmer doing some language hopping without ever really learning much besides some casual basics. Just the sentence "but the self keyword was still confusing" is a tell-all. In Python, self is not a keyword. Don't get me wrong, it's great when non-programmers (who certainly have other valuable skills) play around a bit with toy programming, but real software engineering or even computer science are much more than pondering over curly braces. If you really want to learn this, then that's where you should start. And yes, a CS university degree would get you there, not some half-baked Rust tutorial. That's just an insult to everybody who learned this for real. Comparable to somebody claiming "at age 40 I finally learned medicine!" after watching a few episodes of Dr House and reading the wikipedia page of appendectomy.
ulzeraj 6y ago
I've been a Linux sysadmin for more than 15 years. I've never been into programming except for a few batch scripts. However my last jobs involved a lot of deployment and monitoring custom stuff and combined with this DevOps hype I've been coding a lot of stuff lately. I kinda regret not improving my coding skills earlier.
ThePadawan 6y ago
Now I feel like I need to apologize for TAing a class that taught Logo to college freshmen. This was a CS class for non-technical natural science freshmen, so it was full of pharmacy, biology, geology students etc. It's primary purpose was also to (in 14 weeks!) teach the barest detail of all of computing, from basic circuits (~1week) to Logo programming (IIRC < 4weeks) to data science and statistics using R (2weeks) and the concepts behind OOP (1 week, IIRC not on the exam). Teaching Logo to 18 year olds that had never in their life been interested in programming was an eye-opening experience: Some students (imo rightfully) only did the exercises to get through the exam, since all they wanted was to pass the class. Fair enough! Others solved the exercises about for-loops one week, then started asking follow-up questions about infinite loops and accidentally inventing while-loops and their eyes lit up and you could tell that they got it, even though this wasn't even their primary degree direction. Looking back, as a CS student, I wish I had taken more classes like this, designed to make you question if you were actually taking a degree in the direction of what you were most interested in. Our CS program was math, math, math and 15% programming. Not really any jumping points from that (except into Mathematics).
- lemoing 6y ago
  Your last point is a good one. I started in math and had to take a few CS courses (which I ended up switching into), but I had almost no exposure to subjects outside those two. At least here in Canada, it feels like electives are de-emphasized and there's little opportunity to explore other subjects. I'm happy with the way things turned out but wish I could have taken a broader course load.
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nullsense 6y ago
I remember discovering QBasic as a kid and being totally absorbed in it. I couldn't understand what an array was, so that halted my progress. I rediscovered it as a teenager in highschool and wound up making a basic platform game with a mess of shitty spaghetti code goto statements and drawing lines on the screen. It was great. My dad wanted to encourage me but didn't know how, so he got me a C++ book from the library but it just made no sense and I couldn't get anywhere. Fast forward to being 23 and deciding what to major in at University. I rediscovered the idea of programming and instantly fell back in love with it. I remember blowing through the entire first semester textbook in 2 weeks and really getting it. It felt like a super power had finally been unlocked. Still does. I was so glad to reconnect with programming. I always feel I would have been an absolute whizz kid by now if I had really picked it up when I was a teenager and part of me is a little sad about that.
- kimjongtrill 6y ago
  Be that whiz kid now. You needed time to “kid” and now you have time to program.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    I am, but at 32 I'll be that whiz kid by 40. Heck, I'll take that. I love mastering the craft and getting deeper and deeper into it each year. It's rewarding. Though being a decade ahead would be pretty astounding. That being said in just 7 short years I've gotten onto doing platform level development and having a great time doing it, so I'm pretty much right where I want to be.
- shoo 6y ago
  > discovering QBasic as a kid and being totally absorbed in it. I couldn't understand what an array was i started off programming with qbasic as well -- i remember when i finally figured out what arrays were and how to use them -- now if i wanted to animate many enemies/projectiles i didn't need to keep copying and pasting and defining more and more variables for each new entity! magic! at some point i got hold of a copy of darkbasic (a basic product with simple access to input, 2d graphics and sound) and made some home-brewed space invaders knock off -- all of the entity state was encoded as some horrible huge 2d array -- one index for entity id, the other index for attribute. probably all attributes were stored as integers, with different meanings depending upon the entity type, also stored as an int in one of the columns.
historyremade 6y ago
Straight out Rust Propaganda and Hidden Marketing.
monkeydust 6y ago
I am a nudge over 40 and learning to discovers the joys of programming again. I am on the product side, have coded in the past around a decade ago (C++) as part of a rotation scheme at company and learnt BASIC in school. The thing that got me interested in this again was the excellent 'Automate the Boring Stuff with Python' https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ https://automatetheboringstuff.com/. This was my best lockdown read so far. I have used it automate some dumb stuff I have to do at work (moving mouse clicking). Get real-time custom alerts on my bank transactions and a develop an app that logs into a site, searches keywords, scrapes results and sends me an email each morning. Can't recommend the book highly enough.
ajuc 6y ago
I think Turbo Pascal was the perfect language to learn programming. It has a simple core, a static type system without much bells and whistles but that's more solid than the C crazyness, it doesn't force the student to learn 10 different concepts at the same time before writing HelloWorld (unlike Java and other OO languages), but it teaches thinking about types and not only values (unlike scripting languages). Sadly it's basically dead now.
- rimliu 6y ago
  and it had an amazing IDE for the times. My first useful programs were written in TP in the late 90-ties.
  - neilv 6y ago
    Turbo Pascal was always technically excellent in many ways, and also relatively affordable. (The Microsoft development tools were prohibitively expensive for most non-businesses.) IIRC, the IDE started with Turbo Pascal version 4.0. In earlier versions of Turbo Pascal (at least 3.0 and 2.0), there was no IDE. IRC, TP before 4.0 had some kind of simple text screen for switching between the compiler and a text editor. I started with a copy of Turbo Pascal 2.0 for generic MS-DOS (generic, in that it didn't use IBM PC BIOS features), which a computer shop owner kindly transferred from 8-inch floppy to the 5.25" oddball format that my not-very-PC-compatible used. The cover of manual was monochrome blue, rather than the more familiar multicolored one. http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/borpasv.htm#tp2 http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/borpasv.htm#tp2 I heard that Philipe Kahn named the company "Borland" because it sounded like an American astronaut name, so I suppose that could be the reason for the outer space theme (other than a lot of computer things having sci-fi space themes around then).
- lioeters 6y ago
  After BASIC and LOGO, Turbo Pascal was the first language I became fluent in, during my pre-teens. If I recall correctly, I learned everything from the editor/IDE, help screens, examples, and existing code. What really accelerated my learning was being given a large codebase (a bulletin-board system) to work on, and seeing how it all fit together to make a running application. Next was C in my teens, I learned enough to create a little language that controls hardware via serial port, RS232. I remember starting to learn C++ and object-oriented programming. For some reason, I drifted away from computers after that. Like the author, I found myself in various countries and occupations, always feeling that I had untapped potential and talent, but never able to make the transition. Fortunately, in my late 30's I rediscovered the joy of programming. The web was the gateway, starting with HTML and CSS. Once I got the hang of it, it was unstoppable - I just kept learning and building more and more every day, because it was so fun. It took a couple years to become a full-time, professional programmer. I picked up server-side languages, released open-source libraries, which led to clients and later co-founding software companies. A funny thing is, things have come full circle, and now I spend a lot of my time with TypeScript, another creation of Anders Hejlsberg. How the language integrates with the editor (in my case VS Code) to support software development, showing hints, smart autocompletion, navigating type definitions.. It reminds me of Turbo Pascal's IDE in some aspects. --- The past year or so, I've had a lot of fun with Raspberry Pi. It's a perfect hobby, and I'm now re-learning C so I can control hardware. I remember being ten years old, reading a manual on 8086 assembly language. So happy to be back where I started, with that sweet childhood joy of tinkering with computers.
iamericfletcher 6y ago
Here I am, 30 years old learning to program for the first time. Specifically, the R and Python languages. I love it, but can't help and think how I would have got on it much earlier in my life if it wasn't for an alcoholic household and the abundance of veiled criticisms I received from my family for trying to use computing as an escape from the toxicity. Never too late!
jamesbfb 6y ago
Hey, another another person who started “later” in life checking in. I’m 36 but started when I was around 29. The common theme here seems to be “grew up around computers but fell into a different career” My start was working for a company in a developing country who were struggling to find a way to escape spreadsheet hell. I was a business analyst but decided it surely couldn’t be that hard to program and create some kind of system myself! A month or 2 studying “Head First PHP” and I started work on a system to help the company manage their import, export and container yard operations. A few months later I was done. To my knowledge (and absolute horror), they are still using it to this day. I’m back in Australia 3 years ago, happily working as a senior dev, but reading some of the posts here really brings back memories of the excitement I would get when those “ah ha!” moments would strike during those initial first months.
- josefrichter 6y ago
  On the other hand, if you made something that is still used "in production" for several years now, that's quite an achievement. Well done.
gogopuppygogo 6y ago
Started my professional career as a teenager. I was in board rooms advising CEO’s before turning 18. I started in infrastructure. First building gaming computers for clients then shifting to a new model servicing business clients by setting up servers, implementing computer and phone networks, setting up a PBX or VoIP system. Then transitioned from that to designing data centers and call centers for larger clients. Got deep into the architecture of ip transit layers. Fell into resale of existing tech and security for servers/networks/endpoints. Cloud started eating the market for private data center facilities so I started a VoIP company. We did novel stuff with open platforms to create high density usage without performance impacts on 10 year old hardware (back when hardware was still expensive because cloud couldn’t do telephony well). Had bad a business partner and got out of that. Throughout all of this I somehow never needed to learn to code more than HTML/CSS. I decided to learn when I turned 30 and my careers future was unclear. About three months in, I realized that I needed practice building real world tech not just codeacademy. I hired a tutor to help me learn to program as I only had about 2 hours a week to spend on it. After three years of being tutored I’ve written a data aggregator sifting through various order data and building custom reports, I’ve used machine learning to filter important content based on content, I’ve built integration with payment gateways and a basic ledger system to track payments, I’ve done all this to work on a startup. I’ve pivoted over time but the concept is still motivating me. I still consult as a tech leader. I’m a much more capable leader having learned to code with my other skills coupled together. My recommendation to any professional looking to learn these skills is to hire a tutor. I could spend 100 hours of trial and error that a person with 20 years of experience can figure out in 5 minutes. If you are based in the USA you can find someone for $50/hour or so overseas to help you. That’s $400/month but still less expensive than many paid courses/schools and you get to set the criteria/agenda for your own needs.
- Dhghomon- 6y ago
  >My recommendation to any professional looking to learn these skills is to hire a tutor. On a similar note, if you're not shy / don't have the funds you can stream yourself learning a language on Twitch and be inundated with people telling you what you should do every time you get stuck. [This guy](https://youtu.be/IwbHcXsCWd0?t=5754 https://youtu.be/IwbHcXsCWd0?t=5754) comes to mind. Every time he streams, a virtual army of advisors shows up to tell him what to do (to the point that he frequently has to tell them sorry, I really need to figure this out myself before I look at your solutions).
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lordnacho 6y ago
There's something about games as your motivation for learning to code that is quite unfortunate: Games, especially the popular ones, are monstrously difficult to write. And I say this as a C++ HFT guy who's written a load of programs for all sorts of other things. - Games will break your OOP tutorial learnings. If you're starting out with a game, it is gonna get mighty difficult to fit whatever it is into a set of objects. By the time you come around to an ECS, you've probably got a fair bit of experience under your belt. - A lot of games have a realtime component. So now you need to know about performance, so that you can draw a frame in a few ms. To do that, you need an abstraction of the machine that includes things like cache misses and branch prediction. - Syntax for c++ is probably the weirdest among common languages, and you need to know it in order to do all the allocations and type safe calls. You'll need a bunch of knowledge about how the thing builds, which also isn't trivial. (Why h files?) - Games might have 3D graphics. Now you'll need a math course, and a bit of reading about some particular lib. - Games tend to have multiple abstraction layers. If you need a high performance data structure, you'll have to spend time on writing that while also thinking about the thing you're using it for. You might end up mixing the game logic with your data structure if your thinking is muddled. - You'll need some artwork. It's not as easy as you might think to come up with some nice colors for your characters. Textures, see 3D graphics. - Gameplay itself is a huge topic straddling coding, design and culture. - Want to play with the computer? Game AI is another huge one. I'm not surprised if 99% of kids who thought they'd learn c++ gave up. As for my own journey, it tended to be connected to trading. Before I did that, there were moments when I wrote code, including at uni, but they never amounted to a whole that could be used for anything useful. I think having a domain problem helped focus things a lot, in that certain things are prioritized. I still don't know how to do graphics, game AI, and artwork, because trading systems tend not to have those. Once I got to a comfortable place in terms of skill, I branched out into apps and websites, though I don't consider myself an expert on those. That's also a useful journey, bringing in large areas of experience that I hadn't started with.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  I was tinkering around in the Minecraft code and man, I have no idea how people use inheritance when designing complex games without completely losing their minds. I know composition vs. inheritance is a nuanced debate, and there are people who can tell me exactly how to do inheritance the right way and why they feel it's better -- but after I learned how much cleaner composition feels I went with it and never seriously looked back.
Dowwie 6y ago
40 year old tech-entrepreneur here. In my 30s, I became the tech lead who I needed as a co-founder. I learned by doing, with periods of great intensity, over many years. There's so much I haven't accomplished yet and so much more to learn. Setting the right goals has been just as challenging as learning how to accomplish them. I take a first-principles approach to understanding fundamentals rather than simply hacking together a solution. This is a very time and energy-consuming approach, but it lends itself to stronger long-term results. Expertise compounds itself over time, block by block. The first year working with any new domain of material is always the hardest, but enduring the process ultimately yields great returns. Endurance is essential to growth. Anyone out there who is reading this and experiencing hardship, do not give up! These hard times will pass, your fears will subside, and a stronger version you will remain. You can achieve your goals!
holidayacct 6y ago
I'm having a difficult time believing that someone picked up coding and is proficient in doing so at 40 years old unless they had prior experience in something that was similar. It takes years to become proficient in coding to the point where you don't utilize massive amounts of executive function (which we have a finite amount of in any given day). In addition the act of reading and writing code does a ton of damage to the Wernicke and Brocas area. Over time it can cause damage to the ventral what pathway to the point of complete speech impediment, memory loss and even Alzheimers. Always be extremely skeptical of anyone learning to code in their 40s, they can do it for short stretches but it is probably not a good idea to pick up coding for the first time in your 40s since the probability of doing damage to your brain is going to be relatively high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area
- conjectures 6y ago
  > Over time it can cause damage to the ventral what pathway to the point of complete speech impediment, memory loss and even Alzheimers. This sounds like complete guff to me. Citation sorely needed.
  - holidayacct 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia Speak to a neuroscientist if you don't believe me.
    - asdfman123 6y ago
      Please link to an article explaining your claims, because the wikipedia articles you're linking to don't describe anything you're talking about. I'm actually curious because it's an interesting proposition, even if I'm very skeptical.
    - nickles 6y ago
      > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia Speak to a neuroscientist if you don't believe Your source doesn't support your assertion. It lists the more common causes as: * Stroke or brain anoxia. * Brain tumor * Brain trauma And is shows less common causes as: * Autoimmune disease * Paraneoplastic syndrome * Micrometastasis * neurodegenerative disorders * Certain infections (e.g., Bartonella henselae[19]) * Metabolic disease (e.g., hyperosmolar hyperglycemic state[20])
azangru 6y ago
Sigh. Every new blog posts of someone finding joy in Rust makes me think there's something wrong with me. I started with Ruby, then migrated to JavaScript, then was introduced to the joy of static types, first with Flow, then with TypeScript — and now I'm stuck. Dynamically typed languages, including Ruby, Python, or PHP, terrify me; I can't understand people singing praises to Python. OCaml looks ... ugly. Rust looks both ugly and weird. Haskell is luringly beautiful, but at the same time hard and elusive as a unicorn. While Typescript is so nice and warm and cozy...
- zozbot234 6y ago
  ReasonML is pretty much Ocaml with "not-so-ugly" syntax.
- asdfman123 6y ago
  No, nothing wrong with you. People are just interested in different things. I love posts that geek out over low level memory stuff, but I literally avoided learning ANY Javascript framework until this year, to the detriment of many former interviews. Neither is better. The most important thing you can do is expose yourself to a lot of different influences and then just drill down into what you're interested in, without having to justify it or apologize for it. It's amazing where following your real interests will lead you, and the world that it will reveal to you. If you instead try to force-feed yourself, you won't learn much, because you won't stick to it.
evo_9 6y ago
Yeah so first off - great! It's a super rewarding skill to have and I'm grateful to be a programmer myself. Turning that skill into your profession is going to be tough. I say this because I've been programming professional for 20 years or so and I'm currently interviewing. The process of getting a coding job has gotten extremely hard and demanding. 5-8 years back it was solely based on the interview; if you knew your stuff and could talk-the-talk, they'd generally take a chance you could walk-the-walk. Now, it's gotten extremely unreasonable. Mostly in the 'code-challenges' being asked. I recently was given an challenge and after they gave me a small overview of it, I asked roughly what the time-box should be to get a feel for what they thought the effort take. The hiring manager said to me 'it shouldn't take more than 8 hours'. I was shocked. I've been given many coding challenges, they generally fall into the 2 hours or less category. 8 hours is a serious time commitment. I ended up passing because if this is what they find reasonable during the interview I can't imagine what kind of demands they'd place on me day-in-day out. That's just one recent example. Before that I was asked to write a simple todo list, and given a time box of 2 days. In that case I chose to do it because I knew I could do something like that in way less than 2 days. I ended up using the full 2 days just sprucing up the UX. I ended up not getting an offer from that company because I bombed the 2 hour group interview which I knew would happen; our family pet had been suddenly ill and in the ICU for 4 days straight and my wife and I had maybe 8 hours of sleep over the previous 5 days. Of course I tried to reschedule but the technical recruiter was adamant this last interview was just a formality, they loved my star-wars themed todo list (Jedi-Do, it's on my github: https://github.com/LowRezSkyline/Jedi_Do https://github.com/LowRezSkyline/Jedi_Do) and an offer was pending. So it's one thing to learn programming and quite another to get through the crazy gate-keeping happening these days and land an actual job. Maybe it's easier for entry level programming positions, I have no idea. Best of luck either way!
- asdfman123 6y ago
  It's still reasonable in the enterprise world. There is a life outside of Silicon Valley. I like a lot of other enterprise devs know if I studied for a few weeks for the interviews I could get a foothold into that universe, but it's just... meh. Not worth it. I like my life.
bitwize 6y ago
I started programming when I was a wee lad, and never stopped. Speaking as one of those insufferable "whiz kids" of the 80s, I say this: any path to discovering the wonders and joys of this technology is equally good. If you aren't a programmer, no matter what your age or background, now is a great time to start.
ausjke 6y ago
I would focus on one field and go deeper, be it c,c++,python,javascript...I have been programming for many years, looking back, lots of time spending on learning many different things at different times, which is bad actually. If I can do it again, I will focus more on one or two areas and excel there. A neurosurgeon or heart doctor earns way more than a family doctor, the former is specialist and the latter is knowing-it-all-but-nothing-in-particular.
scipute68 6y ago
Remember driving home from work one day (SA when Linux was first making a noise in the Novell world) and wanting nothing more grand than to learn to properly code in (gnu) awk and expect (tcl). After 23 years I don't even enjoy coding anymore. It's about getting the task out of the inbox and into the outbox.
markus_zhang 6y ago
I'm on the same boat. Kind of weird (and again in the same boat as OP) as I was probably among the few in my country to actually have access to a brand new IBM PC back in the late 80s as my father got it from the university as part of the research grant. Most of my friends were lucky to own a NES at that time. But I never got the idea to learn programming. Even as I was super interested in games and game programming (idea eventually hit), I again decided NOT to take CS as my major back in the university. It looks like I'm trying to stay away from my hobby. No idea why. Then finally a few years ago I suddenly decided to teach myself C++ and from there I gradually built up my knowledge here and there. C++ hit me as a very good language to begin with (not a good idea btw), at least on the side of game programming. As I'd like to program retro RPGs, custom engine came as a natural thing as the earlier games were very easy on graphics. Anyway I did program a half done map editor and game for an Ultima spin-off and that was pretty much it. Eventually I got myself a couple of nice jobs so I didn't have much time for programming at the moment, but still trying to get a bit done here and there, mostly data structure and algorithm as I want to get a bit deeper before working on any medium size game project. Anyway I don't want to turn this into a professional job as that might be tedious (I work in a game dev company). Working on side projects could be very fun!
guyzero 6y ago
So while I learned to program BASIC at 10 or so on a Commodore PET, there were plenty of adults who were also learning BASIC for the first time in that same wave of early home computers. I had a friend whose dad (an optometrist) was very into programming their TI 99/4A. And I'm pretty sure my high school computer science teacher hadn't been programming a lot longer than I had (although he was a good teacher). So in a lot of ways, learning programming as an adult is a tradition that is as old as home computers. You're never too old to learn something new.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  I learned to program on a TI 99/4A, and my high school “computer science” teacher was actually a math teacher who took some interest in computers. I wish I had been able to take a fuller CS curriculum in HS.
  - guyzero 6y ago
    it was actually pretty shocking how good my high school CS program was - this was Ontario in the mid-80's. I learned boolean logic and basic CS theory as well as getting to work on a full-fledged UNIX system (QNX). I even figured out how to write my own login prompt emulator to phish for other people's logins. What more could you want?
renatoakamur 6y ago
On the same boat too. My first language was QBasic on a 286 on 90's.. I studied CS when was 18 but life put me on another direction and I worked on entertainment (music events) for 10 years until a crisis on my 30's. After that, I tried to be a designer but when doing my portfolio online I felt more pleasure coding my site than doing the works itself. Now I'm actively coding for the last 6/7 years and doing another graduation (IT Management).
kaidon 6y ago
Great story! I've always programmed, but went through the same nonsense in Calgary as you!
karmicthreat 6y ago
I can sympathize. I always knew how to program since my teens. I'm 45 now, and didn't really start doing professional programming till I was in my late 30s. I worked hard for about 6 years to build up enough experience to feel confident doing this. Now I'm at the point where my current job is pretty boring and we don't grow enough to bring in harder problems. But I also really don't want to move out to SV to work on Neuralink, sats, robots. Even though those problems are one that would be super interesting.
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
  > I'm at the point where my current job is pretty boring and we don't grow enough to bring in harder problems This is usually the point at which I job hunt. Honestly, I need a place where new and interesting problems keep propping up. I don't think I'll ever settle but I do always leave on good terms.
  - karmicthreat 6y ago
    Unfortunately I am in West Michigan. This is not a place with terribly interesting problems. I probably need to put together my own thing. Whats the hardest problem anyone here has that they would pay money to have solved?
    - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
      You'd be surprised how often people can't express the problem and can't find the proper software solution. A lot of manpower in most organizations is wasted because they can't find a contractor who will listen to their problems and actually try to fix them.
      - karmicthreat 6y ago
        Oh I'm not surprised at all. I'm guilty of this at my job as is everyone else where we work. What is our problem, what is our customers problem is always a hard question. One of my big goals right now is to figure out how to extract problems out of customers in a useful way. (I seem to be heading more and more to product manager/product owner skill set).
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I've been writing software pretty much my entire adult life. But I was a manager for 25 years, which meant that I had to work on coding during nights and weekends. I got a lot done, but I really feel as if it stunted my development. Also, I was deliberately working on software that was designed to be taken over by folks with limited skillsets, so the tech edge was blunt. This turned out to be exactly the correct thing to do. That work has taken off in a big way, and is now being extended in new ways, by some talented and up-to-date engineers. So, three years ago, I left the company I'd been working at for 27 years, dumped a bunch of my money into a couple of companies, and started to re-educate myself. It's working out very, very well. Far better than I imagined it would. I may never get paid a dime for any of my work, ever again, but I am producing some of the finest software I've ever written. I've learned a ton, and I'm really just getting started. Over the weekend, I started work on a project that may or may not end up in open source, but will likely be one of the most ambitious projects that I've done. The last three years have helped me to get to the point where I have no issue diving in. I'm pretty psyched.
cptnapalm 6y ago
Felt this. I had a C64 which came with BASIC. It was a struggle to get it to do what I wanted. Years later, I realized I was trying to things like write functions which you just couldn't do. Gave up. Years and years later I had a AMD K6 233, had opted to try Red Hat Linux because Win95 was awful and was obsessed with playing Quake which I knew was written in C. So, I tried to learn C. Several times. I never got to the "click" point. John Carmack, as I remember it, said to learn programming, do nothing else for 6 months. Eventually, years later, I did take that advice. It worked. I remember vividly when I finally grasped pointers. I wrote and expanded a dice roller to gloriously stupid proportions; it was threaded, had a very easy to use and flexible configuration file format and I was working on adding networking when the hard drive died. No backups. Yay. And a new problem appeared: I wasn't a rank amateur anymore, but for the life of me I couldn't think of any program I wanted to write. So the skills lapsed. Then I would have too many ideas and interests which resulted in the same conclusion, but would have to relearn first. I'd also be pulled in so many directions (robots! comic book timeline! starship emulator! UNIX shell idea, but in Klingon!), the result was the same: I'd accomplish nothing, despairing of ever doing anything. So, I remain a perpetual amateur.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

302 points by Stratoscope 6y ago

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/ 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 https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap

Austin_Conlon 6y ago
Also https://missing.csail.mit.edu https://missing.csail.mit.edu.
xenihn 6y ago
You can also realistically learn Swift and then never have to write anything else again, until iOS stops being a career at least.
- usrnm 6y ago
  People used to think the same thing about Objective C
  - Brajeshwar 6y ago
    Yes, just as Flash/ActionScript. At a time, we almost believed Flash Player was everyone on the Internet.
    - Kwantuum 6y ago
      Isn't ActionScript just a dialect of EcmaScript? I would guess transitioning from that to Javascript would be pretty easy.
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Without the nice IDE experience though.
        FormFollowsFunc 6y ago
        There was an IDE for ActionScript called FDT built on top of Eclipse.
        pjmlp 6y ago
        I meant that JavaScript/HTML/CSS has yet to offer anything similar to the Flash development experience.
        Brajeshwar 6y ago
        Well, the Flash IDE itself was a horrible compiler for those who write mostly ActionScript. We used to compile with few open source compilers. I have forgotten the names.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      It still is, https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpxflash.html https://www.leaningtech.com/pages/cheerpxflash.html
  - Austin_Conlon 6y ago
    Seems like it’s going to be many years before Objective-C is no longer viable, and there’s a lot of it to maintain (especially Apple’s). I think the only Swift-exclusive frameworks are SwiftUI, Combine, and WidgetKit.
    - Grustaf 6y ago
      It would be pretty crazy to learn only objective c today, unless you want to go after the legacy market specifically, like someone learning Cobol to get bank contracts. Maybe it suits some people but for most people it’s sad and frustrating to work with old messy systems in obsolete languages when there’s a shiny new one that’s objectively much better in almost every way.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Here is a little secret, while Swift is the future of systems programming on Apple platforms, there is still plenty of stuff written in a mix of C++ and Objective-C. In which languages do you think Core Audio and Metal are written on?
- Austin_Conlon 6y ago
  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.
- darksaints 6y ago
  Why would you take a bet like that with Apple trying their best to destroy the iOS market for developers?
susam 6y ago
> QW Basic Did you mean GW-BASIC? Or maybe QBasic? Or perhaps QuickBasic? By the way, I have archived these obsolete pieces of software from MS-DOS era at https://github.com/susam/dosage https://github.com/susam/dosage (search for Basic in the README) if anyone wants to try their hands on them again.
yugene 6y ago
And here's a compact list of the possible resources to use: https://teachyourselfcs.com https://teachyourselfcs.com
tasogare 6y ago
To some extend the engineering part is emerging: when a code base grows it becomes necessary to learn technics to factor it. What I find really time consuming when using a new language is searching for its API.

hevelvarik 6y ago

Wow wasn’t expecting this to climax with Rust

mlindner 6y ago
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).
- hevelvarik 6y ago
  I’m the same way, I study other things and hope for the day to have to learn a more interesting language than the ones I’m paid to work in. But at the end of the day, taking a step back, there are a good deal of more helpful things for a professional dev to learn than languages he or she isn’t writing anything in currently.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  > (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). This also seems the author's problem. It reads like he feels he should ought to learn programming but he doesn't actually have any particular problems he wants solved.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Well, in that case on should look at existing learning materials. Maybe something like Project Euler, advent of code or a good old fashioned dead tree (book).
- mirekrusin 6y ago
  Write those things top to bottom https://projecteuler.net/archives https://projecteuler.net/archives

susam 6y ago

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

bartvk 6y ago
Very nice, and it was actually properly attributed, too.

darkteflon 6y ago

I'm in this boat. Finally started programming in 2018 at age 38 after a lifetime of playing around with computers as a hobby (thanks, dad!) and a first career in a completely unrelated field, as an attorney. The linked article is about learning for pleasure, but there are also challenges associated with trying to enter the field as a second career. The technical complexity, of course, and the scale of what needs to be learned, can sometimes be overwhelming. It helps to bring as much humility to the process as you can muster. But peoples' perceptions can also be a challenge - no one quite knows what to make of you! I like to think it's an opportunity. If you're able to combine domain expertise from your first career with a solid grasp of CS fundamentals and a good day-to-day working knowledge of your toolchain, that can make you a pretty rare interdisciplinary candidate. Perhaps that then informs how you market yourself and to whom. Best of luck to anyone coming at this as a second career!

tehlike 6y ago
I have a friend who is an attorney that's fairly technical - he can't write code but he understands how it works when reading it. He does combine his interdisciplinary skill - started a company in his main domain using software as a tool. I'm constantly impressed by him.
throwaway17_17 6y ago
I thought for a moment I blacked out and posted to HN without knowing it. I too am a 38 years old attorney who learned CS/Programming late in life. I haven’t had any success in finding relevant job openings for my particular coding knowledge, but I keep looking. Just knowing you exist gives me hope I may still be able to break into tech, at some level. And given that Hurricane Laura just decimated my city ( and my home and my office) I need some hope right now.
- eecc 6y ago
  Well, being an attorney you could dig yourself a nice rabbit hole with Lucene, a Java library for text indexing and analysis at the foundation of many Java based search engines (for example Solr, Elastichsearch.) Combine it then with your expertise to analyze documents from your business domain for example

susam 6y ago

The article mentions that Logo did not provide a very good experience to the author. I am glad to know that he still found another way back to programming and had a great time with Rust. In my life, Logo opened a whole new world for me. I began coding with IBM/LCSI PC Logo in my childhood days. The first line of code I ever wrote was: FD 100 That's the "hello, world" of turtle graphics in Logo. That simple line of code changed my world. I could make stuff happen in an otherwise mostly blank monochrome CRT display. Until then I had seen CRTs in televisions where I had very little control on what I see on the screen. But now, I had control. The turtle became my toy and I could make it draw anything on a 320 x 250 canvas. The next beautiful piece of code I came across in the same language was: REPEAT 360 [FD 1 RT 1] The code above draws an approximation of a circle by combining 360 short line segments. It showed me how control flow can be used elegantly to express complex ideas in a simple expression. And then I came across this: REPEAT 20 [REPEAT 180 [FD 1 RT 2] RT 18] The above code draws 20 overlapping circles. The output looks like this: https://susam.in/files/blog/dosbox-logo-1.png https://susam.in/files/blog/dosbox-logo-1.png. By the way, it is the same image that the author of this article has reused in his article. :-) At an impressionable age of 9, reading and writing code like this, and using simple arithmetic, geometry, logic, and code to manipulate a two-dimensional world had a lasting effect on me. Back in those days, I used to find joy in sharing some of my interesting Logo programs with my teachers and friends. I like to believe that my passion for software engineering as well as my love for writing code, sharing code, and open source development are a result of coming across these beautiful code examples early in my life.

susam 6y ago
For all the Logo fans out here, we have Slack and IRC channels at https://bit.ly/fd100slack1 https://bit.ly/fd100slack1 and https://webchat.freenode.net/#fd100 https://webchat.freenode.net/#fd100 . Most members of these channels are also Hacker News users. Please do join it even if you don't remember Logo anymore. The intention here is not to discuss Logo but to share the joy of computing that we discovered through Logo and has remained in our lives. I hope to see you all there. :-)
- larsbrinkhoff 6y ago

busterarm 6y ago

Not quite the same story, but I've been programming since I was 5 or 6 years old and it took me until I was 30 to make a career out of it. Turns out everything else that I've done with computers in the meantime helped and is a force multiplier in my job.

Stratoscope 6y ago

This story was rather poignant for me, as I am, let's just say quite a bit over 40. I learned to program when I was in high school and noticed a Teletype 33 ASR in a corner of the math classroom. I knew about Teletypes from being a ham radio operator, but I thought they were just for sending and receiving text over the air or over a phone line to another Teletype. You could either connect to the other Teletype and type in real time, or you could punch a paper tape first and then send it over the air or across the wire at the full speed of 10 characters per second. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletype_Model_33 This Teletype was special, though. The school had an account with a local timesharing computer company, and for a mere $30 per hour ($200/hour in today's dollars) you could dial in and run a BASIC program. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-sharing Naturally my first program was: 10 PRINT "HELLO" and it printed HELLO! You can probably guess the next line I added to the program: 20 GOTO 10 Whoops! This wasn't just text scrolling on a screen, it printed out line after line on the roll of Teletype paper. Had to hang up the dialup modem fast. That summer I got a job as "night operator" at the timesharing company (Transdata in Phoenix, AZ). The great thing about this job was they shut down the timesharing service at night. So I had their SDS Sigma 5 all to myself. My first personal computer! I found a copy of the Algol-60 Report and taught myself Algol. And then Sigma 5 machine language. It was great fun to see how much of a program I could write on a single punch card (80 bytes). We had a nice single-card program that you could put in front of a deck of cards to print out the whole card deck. But it was kind of slow, because it would read a card, print the card, read the next card, print that one, etc. There were a few bytes left on that print program card, so I squeezed in code for a double buffer. It would read the first card, start it printing, and then while it printed read in the next card, overlapping the reads and writes so it printed twice as fast. That fall I went to Caltech, lasted a year and flunked out. I loved science and math, but when we got to partial differential equations my mind just couldn't handle it. But there was a systems programming class, and the final project was to write an infix expression parser and evaluator with operator precedence in assembly language. I was the only person in the class to turn in a complete working program with test cases. I could probably tell you exactly where I was sitting when the instructor announced the results. I had found my calling, and have been at it ever since. My secret weapon: while everyone was punching cards with their program, submitting the batch job, and waiting hours or overnight for the core dump when it crashed, I found an interactive console on campus where I could code and run and test my program in real time. Just like the Teletype I learned on. Moving forward to the present, I interviewed with a FAANG company last week. It reminded me a bit of the discouraging experience the article's author initially had with LOGO and competitive programming. Everyone I interviewed with, and the company recruiters, were all super nice and supportive. But the gist of the interview process was to tackle four medium to hard algorithm problems and come up with not only a working solution but a perfectly optimized solution, in 15 minutes each! The recruiters advised me to spend at least an hour or two every day for two weeks on LeetCode banging through as many algorithm problems as I could, timing myself to see if I could solve each one with optimized code in that 15 minute time limit. There was also a system design interview focused on scaling out a backend system to support a billion users. I explained to the recruiter and the interviewer that this wasn't my forte, but I had a lot of experience with low level hardware interfaces and was really interested in a job in their hardware group. They don't hire for a specific role like that, though, they hire "generalist engineers", which means being able to come up with a fully optimized solution for any algorithm in 15 minutes - and without the ability to run and test your code. In fact, they used an online code editor that normally lets you do just that, but this capability was disabled. I suppose they were trying to limit the online editor to match the capabilities of what you could do scribbling code on a whiteboard. This all reminded me of what discouraged the OP's author so much about his initial foray into programming: the competitive coding competition with LOGO. That is fun for some people, but not for him and not for me. I would rather learn how to cooperate with other programmers, not compete with them. One of the algorithm problems stuck in my mind. Of course it was a LeetCode problem that you can read about here: https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-palindrome-ii/ https://leetcode.com/problems/valid-palindrome-ii/ "Given a non-empty string s, you may delete at most one character. Judge whether you can make it a palindrome." In Python, there is a simple solution for this: def is_palindrome_with_at_most_one_character_deleted( string ): if string == string[::-1]: return True for i in range( len(string) ): s = string[:i] + string[i+1:] if s == s[::-1]: return True return False If the string slice notation is unfamiliar, here are some references: https://www.google.com/search?q=python+slice+notation https://www.google.com/search?q=python+slice+notation But of course this simple solution would not be good enough. What about the time complexity? This LeetCode problem has 520,862 submissions at the moment, with 191,325 accepted. The solution above would not be accepted. There is a faster solution, but it is less obvious and prone to off by one errors and other logic errors. It's not that complicated, but not something I would expect anyone to code correctly and verify in 15 minutes. If that kind of competitive programming was what programming looked like to me, I could see myself being easily as discouraged as the OP was. Fortunately there are other fish to catch in this grand ocean of programming!

ganafagol 6y ago

Wow. So this article is just some clueless non-programmer doing some language hopping without ever really learning much besides some casual basics. Just the sentence "but the self keyword was still confusing" is a tell-all. In Python, self is not a keyword. Don't get me wrong, it's great when non-programmers (who certainly have other valuable skills) play around a bit with toy programming, but real software engineering or even computer science are much more than pondering over curly braces. If you really want to learn this, then that's where you should start. And yes, a CS university degree would get you there, not some half-baked Rust tutorial. That's just an insult to everybody who learned this for real. Comparable to somebody claiming "at age 40 I finally learned medicine!" after watching a few episodes of Dr House and reading the wikipedia page of appendectomy.

ulzeraj 6y ago

I've been a Linux sysadmin for more than 15 years. I've never been into programming except for a few batch scripts. However my last jobs involved a lot of deployment and monitoring custom stuff and combined with this DevOps hype I've been coding a lot of stuff lately. I kinda regret not improving my coding skills earlier.

ThePadawan 6y ago

Now I feel like I need to apologize for TAing a class that taught Logo to college freshmen. This was a CS class for non-technical natural science freshmen, so it was full of pharmacy, biology, geology students etc. It's primary purpose was also to (in 14 weeks!) teach the barest detail of all of computing, from basic circuits (~1week) to Logo programming (IIRC < 4weeks) to data science and statistics using R (2weeks) and the concepts behind OOP (1 week, IIRC not on the exam). Teaching Logo to 18 year olds that had never in their life been interested in programming was an eye-opening experience: Some students (imo rightfully) only did the exercises to get through the exam, since all they wanted was to pass the class. Fair enough! Others solved the exercises about for-loops one week, then started asking follow-up questions about infinite loops and accidentally inventing while-loops and their eyes lit up and you could tell that they got it, even though this wasn't even their primary degree direction. Looking back, as a CS student, I wish I had taken more classes like this, designed to make you question if you were actually taking a degree in the direction of what you were most interested in. Our CS program was math, math, math and 15% programming. Not really any jumping points from that (except into Mathematics).

lemoing 6y ago
Your last point is a good one. I started in math and had to take a few CS courses (which I ended up switching into), but I had almost no exposure to subjects outside those two. At least here in Canada, it feels like electives are de-emphasized and there's little opportunity to explore other subjects. I'm happy with the way things turned out but wish I could have taken a broader course load.

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nullsense 6y ago

I remember discovering QBasic as a kid and being totally absorbed in it. I couldn't understand what an array was, so that halted my progress. I rediscovered it as a teenager in highschool and wound up making a basic platform game with a mess of shitty spaghetti code goto statements and drawing lines on the screen. It was great. My dad wanted to encourage me but didn't know how, so he got me a C++ book from the library but it just made no sense and I couldn't get anywhere. Fast forward to being 23 and deciding what to major in at University. I rediscovered the idea of programming and instantly fell back in love with it. I remember blowing through the entire first semester textbook in 2 weeks and really getting it. It felt like a super power had finally been unlocked. Still does. I was so glad to reconnect with programming. I always feel I would have been an absolute whizz kid by now if I had really picked it up when I was a teenager and part of me is a little sad about that.

kimjongtrill 6y ago
Be that whiz kid now. You needed time to “kid” and now you have time to program.
- nullsense 6y ago
  I am, but at 32 I'll be that whiz kid by 40. Heck, I'll take that. I love mastering the craft and getting deeper and deeper into it each year. It's rewarding. Though being a decade ahead would be pretty astounding. That being said in just 7 short years I've gotten onto doing platform level development and having a great time doing it, so I'm pretty much right where I want to be.
shoo 6y ago
> discovering QBasic as a kid and being totally absorbed in it. I couldn't understand what an array was i started off programming with qbasic as well -- i remember when i finally figured out what arrays were and how to use them -- now if i wanted to animate many enemies/projectiles i didn't need to keep copying and pasting and defining more and more variables for each new entity! magic! at some point i got hold of a copy of darkbasic (a basic product with simple access to input, 2d graphics and sound) and made some home-brewed space invaders knock off -- all of the entity state was encoded as some horrible huge 2d array -- one index for entity id, the other index for attribute. probably all attributes were stored as integers, with different meanings depending upon the entity type, also stored as an int in one of the columns.

historyremade 6y ago

Straight out Rust Propaganda and Hidden Marketing.

monkeydust 6y ago

I am a nudge over 40 and learning to discovers the joys of programming again. I am on the product side, have coded in the past around a decade ago (C++) as part of a rotation scheme at company and learnt BASIC in school. The thing that got me interested in this again was the excellent 'Automate the Boring Stuff with Python' https://automatetheboringstuff.com/ https://automatetheboringstuff.com/. This was my best lockdown read so far. I have used it automate some dumb stuff I have to do at work (moving mouse clicking). Get real-time custom alerts on my bank transactions and a develop an app that logs into a site, searches keywords, scrapes results and sends me an email each morning. Can't recommend the book highly enough.

ajuc 6y ago

I think Turbo Pascal was the perfect language to learn programming. It has a simple core, a static type system without much bells and whistles but that's more solid than the C crazyness, it doesn't force the student to learn 10 different concepts at the same time before writing HelloWorld (unlike Java and other OO languages), but it teaches thinking about types and not only values (unlike scripting languages). Sadly it's basically dead now.

rimliu 6y ago
and it had an amazing IDE for the times. My first useful programs were written in TP in the late 90-ties.
- neilv 6y ago
  Turbo Pascal was always technically excellent in many ways, and also relatively affordable. (The Microsoft development tools were prohibitively expensive for most non-businesses.) IIRC, the IDE started with Turbo Pascal version 4.0. In earlier versions of Turbo Pascal (at least 3.0 and 2.0), there was no IDE. IRC, TP before 4.0 had some kind of simple text screen for switching between the compiler and a text editor. I started with a copy of Turbo Pascal 2.0 for generic MS-DOS (generic, in that it didn't use IBM PC BIOS features), which a computer shop owner kindly transferred from 8-inch floppy to the 5.25" oddball format that my not-very-PC-compatible used. The cover of manual was monochrome blue, rather than the more familiar multicolored one. http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/borpasv.htm#tp2 http://www.emsps.com/oldtools/borpasv.htm#tp2 I heard that Philipe Kahn named the company "Borland" because it sounded like an American astronaut name, so I suppose that could be the reason for the outer space theme (other than a lot of computer things having sci-fi space themes around then).
lioeters 6y ago
After BASIC and LOGO, Turbo Pascal was the first language I became fluent in, during my pre-teens. If I recall correctly, I learned everything from the editor/IDE, help screens, examples, and existing code. What really accelerated my learning was being given a large codebase (a bulletin-board system) to work on, and seeing how it all fit together to make a running application. Next was C in my teens, I learned enough to create a little language that controls hardware via serial port, RS232. I remember starting to learn C++ and object-oriented programming. For some reason, I drifted away from computers after that. Like the author, I found myself in various countries and occupations, always feeling that I had untapped potential and talent, but never able to make the transition. Fortunately, in my late 30's I rediscovered the joy of programming. The web was the gateway, starting with HTML and CSS. Once I got the hang of it, it was unstoppable - I just kept learning and building more and more every day, because it was so fun. It took a couple years to become a full-time, professional programmer. I picked up server-side languages, released open-source libraries, which led to clients and later co-founding software companies. A funny thing is, things have come full circle, and now I spend a lot of my time with TypeScript, another creation of Anders Hejlsberg. How the language integrates with the editor (in my case VS Code) to support software development, showing hints, smart autocompletion, navigating type definitions.. It reminds me of Turbo Pascal's IDE in some aspects. --- The past year or so, I've had a lot of fun with Raspberry Pi. It's a perfect hobby, and I'm now re-learning C so I can control hardware. I remember being ten years old, reading a manual on 8086 assembly language. So happy to be back where I started, with that sweet childhood joy of tinkering with computers.

iamericfletcher 6y ago

Here I am, 30 years old learning to program for the first time. Specifically, the R and Python languages. I love it, but can't help and think how I would have got on it much earlier in my life if it wasn't for an alcoholic household and the abundance of veiled criticisms I received from my family for trying to use computing as an escape from the toxicity. Never too late!

jamesbfb 6y ago

Hey, another another person who started “later” in life checking in. I’m 36 but started when I was around 29. The common theme here seems to be “grew up around computers but fell into a different career” My start was working for a company in a developing country who were struggling to find a way to escape spreadsheet hell. I was a business analyst but decided it surely couldn’t be that hard to program and create some kind of system myself! A month or 2 studying “Head First PHP” and I started work on a system to help the company manage their import, export and container yard operations. A few months later I was done. To my knowledge (and absolute horror), they are still using it to this day. I’m back in Australia 3 years ago, happily working as a senior dev, but reading some of the posts here really brings back memories of the excitement I would get when those “ah ha!” moments would strike during those initial first months.

josefrichter 6y ago
On the other hand, if you made something that is still used "in production" for several years now, that's quite an achievement. Well done.

gogopuppygogo 6y ago

Started my professional career as a teenager. I was in board rooms advising CEO’s before turning 18. I started in infrastructure. First building gaming computers for clients then shifting to a new model servicing business clients by setting up servers, implementing computer and phone networks, setting up a PBX or VoIP system. Then transitioned from that to designing data centers and call centers for larger clients. Got deep into the architecture of ip transit layers. Fell into resale of existing tech and security for servers/networks/endpoints. Cloud started eating the market for private data center facilities so I started a VoIP company. We did novel stuff with open platforms to create high density usage without performance impacts on 10 year old hardware (back when hardware was still expensive because cloud couldn’t do telephony well). Had bad a business partner and got out of that. Throughout all of this I somehow never needed to learn to code more than HTML/CSS. I decided to learn when I turned 30 and my careers future was unclear. About three months in, I realized that I needed practice building real world tech not just codeacademy. I hired a tutor to help me learn to program as I only had about 2 hours a week to spend on it. After three years of being tutored I’ve written a data aggregator sifting through various order data and building custom reports, I’ve used machine learning to filter important content based on content, I’ve built integration with payment gateways and a basic ledger system to track payments, I’ve done all this to work on a startup. I’ve pivoted over time but the concept is still motivating me. I still consult as a tech leader. I’m a much more capable leader having learned to code with my other skills coupled together. My recommendation to any professional looking to learn these skills is to hire a tutor. I could spend 100 hours of trial and error that a person with 20 years of experience can figure out in 5 minutes. If you are based in the USA you can find someone for $50/hour or so overseas to help you. That’s $400/month but still less expensive than many paid courses/schools and you get to set the criteria/agenda for your own needs.

Dhghomon- 6y ago
>My recommendation to any professional looking to learn these skills is to hire a tutor. On a similar note, if you're not shy / don't have the funds you can stream yourself learning a language on Twitch and be inundated with people telling you what you should do every time you get stuck. [This guy](https://youtu.be/IwbHcXsCWd0?t=5754 https://youtu.be/IwbHcXsCWd0?t=5754) comes to mind. Every time he streams, a virtual army of advisors shows up to tell him what to do (to the point that he frequently has to tell them sorry, I really need to figure this out myself before I look at your solutions).

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lordnacho 6y ago

There's something about games as your motivation for learning to code that is quite unfortunate: Games, especially the popular ones, are monstrously difficult to write. And I say this as a C++ HFT guy who's written a load of programs for all sorts of other things. - Games will break your OOP tutorial learnings. If you're starting out with a game, it is gonna get mighty difficult to fit whatever it is into a set of objects. By the time you come around to an ECS, you've probably got a fair bit of experience under your belt. - A lot of games have a realtime component. So now you need to know about performance, so that you can draw a frame in a few ms. To do that, you need an abstraction of the machine that includes things like cache misses and branch prediction. - Syntax for c++ is probably the weirdest among common languages, and you need to know it in order to do all the allocations and type safe calls. You'll need a bunch of knowledge about how the thing builds, which also isn't trivial. (Why h files?) - Games might have 3D graphics. Now you'll need a math course, and a bit of reading about some particular lib. - Games tend to have multiple abstraction layers. If you need a high performance data structure, you'll have to spend time on writing that while also thinking about the thing you're using it for. You might end up mixing the game logic with your data structure if your thinking is muddled. - You'll need some artwork. It's not as easy as you might think to come up with some nice colors for your characters. Textures, see 3D graphics. - Gameplay itself is a huge topic straddling coding, design and culture. - Want to play with the computer? Game AI is another huge one. I'm not surprised if 99% of kids who thought they'd learn c++ gave up. As for my own journey, it tended to be connected to trading. Before I did that, there were moments when I wrote code, including at uni, but they never amounted to a whole that could be used for anything useful. I think having a domain problem helped focus things a lot, in that certain things are prioritized. I still don't know how to do graphics, game AI, and artwork, because trading systems tend not to have those. Once I got to a comfortable place in terms of skill, I branched out into apps and websites, though I don't consider myself an expert on those. That's also a useful journey, bringing in large areas of experience that I hadn't started with.

asdfman123 6y ago
I was tinkering around in the Minecraft code and man, I have no idea how people use inheritance when designing complex games without completely losing their minds. I know composition vs. inheritance is a nuanced debate, and there are people who can tell me exactly how to do inheritance the right way and why they feel it's better -- but after I learned how much cleaner composition feels I went with it and never seriously looked back.

Dowwie 6y ago

40 year old tech-entrepreneur here. In my 30s, I became the tech lead who I needed as a co-founder. I learned by doing, with periods of great intensity, over many years. There's so much I haven't accomplished yet and so much more to learn. Setting the right goals has been just as challenging as learning how to accomplish them. I take a first-principles approach to understanding fundamentals rather than simply hacking together a solution. This is a very time and energy-consuming approach, but it lends itself to stronger long-term results. Expertise compounds itself over time, block by block. The first year working with any new domain of material is always the hardest, but enduring the process ultimately yields great returns. Endurance is essential to growth. Anyone out there who is reading this and experiencing hardship, do not give up! These hard times will pass, your fears will subside, and a stronger version you will remain. You can achieve your goals!

holidayacct 6y ago

I'm having a difficult time believing that someone picked up coding and is proficient in doing so at 40 years old unless they had prior experience in something that was similar. It takes years to become proficient in coding to the point where you don't utilize massive amounts of executive function (which we have a finite amount of in any given day). In addition the act of reading and writing code does a ton of damage to the Wernicke and Brocas area. Over time it can cause damage to the ventral what pathway to the point of complete speech impediment, memory loss and even Alzheimers. Always be extremely skeptical of anyone learning to code in their 40s, they can do it for short stretches but it is probably not a good idea to pick up coding for the first time in your 40s since the probability of doing damage to your brain is going to be relatively high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernicke%27s_area

conjectures 6y ago
> Over time it can cause damage to the ventral what pathway to the point of complete speech impediment, memory loss and even Alzheimers. This sounds like complete guff to me. Citation sorely needed.
- holidayacct 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia Speak to a neuroscientist if you don't believe me.
  - asdfman123 6y ago
    Please link to an article explaining your claims, because the wikipedia articles you're linking to don't describe anything you're talking about. I'm actually curious because it's an interesting proposition, even if I'm very skeptical.
  - nickles 6y ago
    > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressive_aphasia Speak to a neuroscientist if you don't believe Your source doesn't support your assertion. It lists the more common causes as: * Stroke or brain anoxia. * Brain tumor * Brain trauma And is shows less common causes as: * Autoimmune disease * Paraneoplastic syndrome * Micrometastasis * neurodegenerative disorders * Certain infections (e.g., Bartonella henselae[19]) * Metabolic disease (e.g., hyperosmolar hyperglycemic state[20])

azangru 6y ago

Sigh. Every new blog posts of someone finding joy in Rust makes me think there's something wrong with me. I started with Ruby, then migrated to JavaScript, then was introduced to the joy of static types, first with Flow, then with TypeScript — and now I'm stuck. Dynamically typed languages, including Ruby, Python, or PHP, terrify me; I can't understand people singing praises to Python. OCaml looks ... ugly. Rust looks both ugly and weird. Haskell is luringly beautiful, but at the same time hard and elusive as a unicorn. While Typescript is so nice and warm and cozy...

zozbot234 6y ago
ReasonML is pretty much Ocaml with "not-so-ugly" syntax.
asdfman123 6y ago
No, nothing wrong with you. People are just interested in different things. I love posts that geek out over low level memory stuff, but I literally avoided learning ANY Javascript framework until this year, to the detriment of many former interviews. Neither is better. The most important thing you can do is expose yourself to a lot of different influences and then just drill down into what you're interested in, without having to justify it or apologize for it. It's amazing where following your real interests will lead you, and the world that it will reveal to you. If you instead try to force-feed yourself, you won't learn much, because you won't stick to it.

evo_9 6y ago

Yeah so first off - great! It's a super rewarding skill to have and I'm grateful to be a programmer myself. Turning that skill into your profession is going to be tough. I say this because I've been programming professional for 20 years or so and I'm currently interviewing. The process of getting a coding job has gotten extremely hard and demanding. 5-8 years back it was solely based on the interview; if you knew your stuff and could talk-the-talk, they'd generally take a chance you could walk-the-walk. Now, it's gotten extremely unreasonable. Mostly in the 'code-challenges' being asked. I recently was given an challenge and after they gave me a small overview of it, I asked roughly what the time-box should be to get a feel for what they thought the effort take. The hiring manager said to me 'it shouldn't take more than 8 hours'. I was shocked. I've been given many coding challenges, they generally fall into the 2 hours or less category. 8 hours is a serious time commitment. I ended up passing because if this is what they find reasonable during the interview I can't imagine what kind of demands they'd place on me day-in-day out. That's just one recent example. Before that I was asked to write a simple todo list, and given a time box of 2 days. In that case I chose to do it because I knew I could do something like that in way less than 2 days. I ended up using the full 2 days just sprucing up the UX. I ended up not getting an offer from that company because I bombed the 2 hour group interview which I knew would happen; our family pet had been suddenly ill and in the ICU for 4 days straight and my wife and I had maybe 8 hours of sleep over the previous 5 days. Of course I tried to reschedule but the technical recruiter was adamant this last interview was just a formality, they loved my star-wars themed todo list (Jedi-Do, it's on my github: https://github.com/LowRezSkyline/Jedi_Do https://github.com/LowRezSkyline/Jedi_Do) and an offer was pending. So it's one thing to learn programming and quite another to get through the crazy gate-keeping happening these days and land an actual job. Maybe it's easier for entry level programming positions, I have no idea. Best of luck either way!

asdfman123 6y ago
It's still reasonable in the enterprise world. There is a life outside of Silicon Valley. I like a lot of other enterprise devs know if I studied for a few weeks for the interviews I could get a foothold into that universe, but it's just... meh. Not worth it. I like my life.

bitwize 6y ago

I started programming when I was a wee lad, and never stopped. Speaking as one of those insufferable "whiz kids" of the 80s, I say this: any path to discovering the wonders and joys of this technology is equally good. If you aren't a programmer, no matter what your age or background, now is a great time to start.

ausjke 6y ago

I would focus on one field and go deeper, be it c,c++,python,javascript...I have been programming for many years, looking back, lots of time spending on learning many different things at different times, which is bad actually. If I can do it again, I will focus more on one or two areas and excel there. A neurosurgeon or heart doctor earns way more than a family doctor, the former is specialist and the latter is knowing-it-all-but-nothing-in-particular.

scipute68 6y ago

Remember driving home from work one day (SA when Linux was first making a noise in the Novell world) and wanting nothing more grand than to learn to properly code in (gnu) awk and expect (tcl). After 23 years I don't even enjoy coding anymore. It's about getting the task out of the inbox and into the outbox.

markus_zhang 6y ago

I'm on the same boat. Kind of weird (and again in the same boat as OP) as I was probably among the few in my country to actually have access to a brand new IBM PC back in the late 80s as my father got it from the university as part of the research grant. Most of my friends were lucky to own a NES at that time. But I never got the idea to learn programming. Even as I was super interested in games and game programming (idea eventually hit), I again decided NOT to take CS as my major back in the university. It looks like I'm trying to stay away from my hobby. No idea why. Then finally a few years ago I suddenly decided to teach myself C++ and from there I gradually built up my knowledge here and there. C++ hit me as a very good language to begin with (not a good idea btw), at least on the side of game programming. As I'd like to program retro RPGs, custom engine came as a natural thing as the earlier games were very easy on graphics. Anyway I did program a half done map editor and game for an Ultima spin-off and that was pretty much it. Eventually I got myself a couple of nice jobs so I didn't have much time for programming at the moment, but still trying to get a bit done here and there, mostly data structure and algorithm as I want to get a bit deeper before working on any medium size game project. Anyway I don't want to turn this into a professional job as that might be tedious (I work in a game dev company). Working on side projects could be very fun!

guyzero 6y ago

So while I learned to program BASIC at 10 or so on a Commodore PET, there were plenty of adults who were also learning BASIC for the first time in that same wave of early home computers. I had a friend whose dad (an optometrist) was very into programming their TI 99/4A. And I'm pretty sure my high school computer science teacher hadn't been programming a lot longer than I had (although he was a good teacher). So in a lot of ways, learning programming as an adult is a tradition that is as old as home computers. You're never too old to learn something new.

pmiller2 6y ago
I learned to program on a TI 99/4A, and my high school “computer science” teacher was actually a math teacher who took some interest in computers. I wish I had been able to take a fuller CS curriculum in HS.
- guyzero 6y ago
  it was actually pretty shocking how good my high school CS program was - this was Ontario in the mid-80's. I learned boolean logic and basic CS theory as well as getting to work on a full-fledged UNIX system (QNX). I even figured out how to write my own login prompt emulator to phish for other people's logins. What more could you want?

renatoakamur 6y ago

On the same boat too. My first language was QBasic on a 286 on 90's.. I studied CS when was 18 but life put me on another direction and I worked on entertainment (music events) for 10 years until a crisis on my 30's. After that, I tried to be a designer but when doing my portfolio online I felt more pleasure coding my site than doing the works itself. Now I'm actively coding for the last 6/7 years and doing another graduation (IT Management).

kaidon 6y ago

Great story! I've always programmed, but went through the same nonsense in Calgary as you!

karmicthreat 6y ago

I can sympathize. I always knew how to program since my teens. I'm 45 now, and didn't really start doing professional programming till I was in my late 30s. I worked hard for about 6 years to build up enough experience to feel confident doing this. Now I'm at the point where my current job is pretty boring and we don't grow enough to bring in harder problems. But I also really don't want to move out to SV to work on Neuralink, sats, robots. Even though those problems are one that would be super interesting.

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
> I'm at the point where my current job is pretty boring and we don't grow enough to bring in harder problems This is usually the point at which I job hunt. Honestly, I need a place where new and interesting problems keep propping up. I don't think I'll ever settle but I do always leave on good terms.
- karmicthreat 6y ago
  Unfortunately I am in West Michigan. This is not a place with terribly interesting problems. I probably need to put together my own thing. Whats the hardest problem anyone here has that they would pay money to have solved?
  - WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
    You'd be surprised how often people can't express the problem and can't find the proper software solution. A lot of manpower in most organizations is wasted because they can't find a contractor who will listen to their problems and actually try to fix them.
    - karmicthreat 6y ago
      Oh I'm not surprised at all. I'm guilty of this at my job as is everyone else where we work. What is our problem, what is our customers problem is always a hard question. One of my big goals right now is to figure out how to extract problems out of customers in a useful way. (I seem to be heading more and more to product manager/product owner skill set).

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I've been writing software pretty much my entire adult life. But I was a manager for 25 years, which meant that I had to work on coding during nights and weekends. I got a lot done, but I really feel as if it stunted my development. Also, I was deliberately working on software that was designed to be taken over by folks with limited skillsets, so the tech edge was blunt. This turned out to be exactly the correct thing to do. That work has taken off in a big way, and is now being extended in new ways, by some talented and up-to-date engineers. So, three years ago, I left the company I'd been working at for 27 years, dumped a bunch of my money into a couple of companies, and started to re-educate myself. It's working out very, very well. Far better than I imagined it would. I may never get paid a dime for any of my work, ever again, but I am producing some of the finest software I've ever written. I've learned a ton, and I'm really just getting started. Over the weekend, I started work on a project that may or may not end up in open source, but will likely be one of the most ambitious projects that I've done. The last three years have helped me to get to the point where I have no issue diving in. I'm pretty psyched.

cptnapalm 6y ago

Felt this. I had a C64 which came with BASIC. It was a struggle to get it to do what I wanted. Years later, I realized I was trying to things like write functions which you just couldn't do. Gave up. Years and years later I had a AMD K6 233, had opted to try Red Hat Linux because Win95 was awful and was obsessed with playing Quake which I knew was written in C. So, I tried to learn C. Several times. I never got to the "click" point. John Carmack, as I remember it, said to learn programming, do nothing else for 6 months. Eventually, years later, I did take that advice. It worked. I remember vividly when I finally grasped pointers. I wrote and expanded a dice roller to gloriously stupid proportions; it was threaded, had a very easy to use and flexible configuration file format and I was working on adding networking when the hard drive died. No backups. Yay. And a new problem appeared: I wasn't a rank amateur anymore, but for the life of me I couldn't think of any program I wanted to write. So the skills lapsed. Then I would have too many ideas and interests which resulted in the same conclusion, but would have to relearn first. I'd also be pulled in so many directions (robots! comic book timeline! starship emulator! UNIX shell idea, but in Klingon!), the result was the same: I'd accomplish nothing, despairing of ever doing anything. So, I remain a perpetual amateur.

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