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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

I'm 27 years old and I don't have much purpose in life. am I'm kind of becoming desperate, to be honest. I have always thought about becoming a programmer but I don't know where to start.

What programming language do you learn first? What languages and skills do you need to learn to become hire-able by a company?

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It's never too late to start. At the beginning you should really focus on trying some things that keep your attention.

(For me that was programming games - incredibly crufty ones, but seeing thing move on my screen got me really excited and got me to understand)

Personally, that was javascript for me - mostly because you can do stuff with it in any browser you want. Lua[0] is also a great language for beginners, and I'm still using it for game development[1] and general scripting/fun stuff.

I just don't want to turn this into a hella long comment, so I'll wrap it up; but I could talk about the first steps you could take for hours :)

If you want to ask me anything on how to get started, just shoot me a mail under info@(my username here).com I'd be super happy to help :)

[0]https://www.lua.org/ [1]https://love2d.org/

Thank you

Do you need an income? If you do then you should probably think about what you can do that would generate an income rather than going for programming.

While programmers can earn good money it isn't necessarily that easy. Another comment recommended Lua, I would say that the language you should learn is the one that fits the problems you want to solve. In other words, the language is a tool, programming itself is a tool, Lua is one specific type of tool and it might or might not be the tool for the job.

My advice, assuming that you insist on learning to program, is to first find a problem that you would like to solve that might be amenable to a programming solution; then pick the language that everyone else thinks is appropriate for that field.

Thank you

Hope its not too late, but due warning: programming will mostly likely not give you "purpose". Its alright, the work is nice sometimes and you can learn a bit, but amongst my friends group and peers I have yet to find anyone who got "purpose" with programming.

About the actual programming language: trust me, it just doesn't matter that much. Just choose Java or Python and you can't go wrong. Pick up an algorithm's course/book and try and solve some problems. Becoming hire-able is a whole other ball game where you need to play with your social networks, make own projects or use your college credentials.

If the "lack of purpose" is making you uncomfortable, you could try sitting with that feeling and listening to it, trying to understand what's going on underneath; it's unlikely to be exactly what it appears. There might be professionals who can guide you in that effort, but I'm not sure what they'd be called exactly.

As for programming, I'd suggest building a few programs by following some tutorials on YouTube. In particular, programs that automate your browser or computer can be really satisfying: "open this page/program, click here, take a screenshot of this area." There should be plenty of tutorials out there that will do a basic setup for those. And if you know any programmers, ask them to help you get started. Almost without fail, I've found the hardest part of programming tutorials is installing things before you start coding. Followed closely by tutorials being out of date. So expect to try a few that don't work before you find a good one. Language does and doesn't matter: again, ask any programmers you know what they'd suggest if you only learned one language (I'd say JS).

Good luck! It's fun building castles in the air. https://commandlinezen.com/explaining-the-joy-of-programming...

To a small minority, programming is an interest in itself. To most programmers, programming is a tool for achieving something they want. I learned to program mainly to make video games and websites.

For a general purpose programming language, I might suggest Lua. It's much less cryptic than most.

It doesn't really matter what you learn, as long as you actually start, and keep up with it.

Doing something is better than doing nothing

Dude honestly I don't care much about programming but its just a way to build stuff and be useful. Grind out all the CS data structures stuff and learn Java. Get a job at a big corp.

Or learn Node and JS and stuff and be a web dev.

Agree with everything you said, although "Get a job" is harder* than it sounds. Learning programming is straightforward, getting a job is non trivial.

Assuming you mean harder than it sounds. Or, easier said than done.

You are right, I conflated both by mistake

Yeah 100%. But if you give off the vibe that you work hard to get stuff done, and you are humble as to what you don't know (shows you will take your time and learn right)... I think you can get an entry job.

Credentials do help though to get your foot in the door, I will say. I was a terrible programmer but had a college degree. Foot was in teh door and now I think i'm a pretty solid distributed java dev (and enough fullstack etc).

1) what an odd place to ask this question

2) this is not a bad first place: https://www.w3schools.com/

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