I'm sorry but how long has it been since newsgroups were relevant? I loved them back in the day but it's absolutely not where a programmer noob should go in order to learn programming.
I wrote that blog-post back in 2014, that was 6 years ago. I learned programming from 2005-2008 and all of that was because of the help I got from the mentioned newsgroups. There used to be a few known names on USENET and everyone knew them and ask them for help. I really loved USENET. These days comp.lang.c is mostly filled with spam and comp.object died sometime ago. Life is about change.
Also some of us here from this forum also hang out at a Freenode channel named #spxy (also accessible via https://app.element.io/#/room/#spxy:matrix.org on Matrix). This is a small computer science and mathematics literature club, so quite relevant to those who are curious about or who work in the intersection of mathematics and programming. Incidentally, many members of this channel are also Lisp programmers.