Is it hard to learn programming?
Hi, my name is Ian, I’m 16 years old and I code since 12 years old. This is my first article and I’d like to share my vision about starting in programming. Is it hard to start? How can I start? What is the better option to start?
Through all these years I saw a lot of people asking these questions and quite confused of what to do.
How can I understand better this universe?
I like to think that programming is like any idiom in the world, like english, portuguese, french… These languages have something in common: They have verbs, pronouns, words… I know that you’re probably wondering with yourself: What does it have to do with programming? Simple. Every programming language has rules and sometimes they are similar. They have “verbs”, “pronouns”, “words” and sometimes it doesn’t even change, let me exemplify:
What does Java, C#, Dart, have in common? They have primitive types: String, int, double and they declare variables in a similar way.
int value = 0;
So you can think that programming languages are like an idiom, the mainly difference is: You use the idiom to communicate with other person and the programming language to communicate with a machine.
So is it hard to learn programming?
Yes and no. Why? Because, as I said, a programming language is like an idiom, but your native idiom you grow up knowing it, the programming language no, you have to learn it. Buuuut, don’t be afraid, after you learn your first language and know the global rules (What is primitive types, methods, variables…) you will practically learn a new programming language in 2, 3 weeks or less, the learning curve of a new language is very smaller
How can I start?
Before you start, you need to decide what language you want to learn first. There are a lot of languages and I can’t decide for you. Choose one and start it. To help you to decide, I going to show you below what are the most famous programming languages currently.
Notice that not necessarily you need to learn one of these languages, you can choose any you want. I just wanted to show this picture to help you in your choice. After that, try to google the language that you want to start and type “start” after.
Javascript start
Another way to start learning is Udemy, an online course plataform. There, you can look for a lot of paid/free courses of the language you want.
What programming languages are the better?
Everyone has your own opinion about that, this is mine: There’s no better. Every programming language has its functionality and purpose.
If you want to create a mobile application for example… I would recommend you Javascript, Dart, Java, Swift to create this application.
If you want to build an web site: Javascript, PHP, Kotlin, Java, Scala..
But be careful, if you’re starting don’t worry about this for now, before everything try to learn a language and understand the global rules, they’re essential to you learn another language after (if you want to).
Conclusion
In this article I tried to help you how to start learning and answer the mainly question: Is it hard? I hope you understand and it was useful for you.
I probably will try to write another articles to help you more about this world.
See you!
