I used to know someone who learnt Dutch from age 60, and granted he's very sharp, but if he can do that, I'm sure you can do this.
this post was submitted on 14 May 2024
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I've been in the tech industry for about 12 years and learned my first programming language about 30 years ago. The choice of language really will depend on the sort of things that you want to do. That said, if choosing one of the three listed, I'd say Go with no reservation. It is a much better language for beginners than the other two as it is widely used, not esoteric, and has a C-like syntax.
I would probably recommend either Python or JavaScript as a better first language though, biased heavily towards Python because JavaScript's type system is awful (it still gets a lot done on the Internet though). Python is a great interpreted language that is very human readable. Yes, some hate that it uses whitespace for party of its syntax but there are very few footguns (don't mix tabs and spaces for indents and just don't use tabs, that's about all that isn't covered in a hello_world).
Age is not a factor. Your ability to learn is
I've had some students who started at 50. The biggest problem is that it is hard to find a junior position as a 50 year old. Age discrimination is definitely a thing. If your goal is to make a career in programming from scratch, you might be too late, but 30 is sometimes already too late in that regard. Networking, nepotism and the good old "foot in the door" helps there. If your goal is just to learn and maybe apply it to your current job or your own business, than it's perfect to start now.
Most succesful students I've seen of the older category are those that have drive and passion. One student had her own fotography studio and wanted to build a database and website for that. She struggled a lot, but persevered and made a great application. Another was a taxi driver who's children put him in the course. He turned out to be very talented and made and excelllent application for planning taxi rides as his final project.
So it depends what your goals are.
ChatGPT is great at tutoring python. Go as well. Not sure on the others.
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