1) I would say around 5 years? That is how long it took my friend realizing that MBA on the school he was attending won't get him very far, banding together wit

1) I would say around 5 years? That is how long it took my friend realizing that MBA on the school he was attending won't get him very far, banding together with a friend of mine that was already developing mobile apps, and working his way through several apps onto being a fairly decent programmer. On one hand, he wasn't very busy student. On the other hand, it took him only a year to be fairly productive in their little tandem. 2) Find a friend who already knows to code. Code with him. That is how I learned coding at highschool :) We wrote a small graphing calc, in the beginning he did bulk of the work, I mostly tested it, read through code, fixed his errors if I found any ... in half a year I was good enough to add my own features. This would answer the second part of the question, write in whatever you programming partner writes. If you take programming seriously, you will learn many different programming languages anyway, and having someone around to share the excitement is excelent starting point :-)