So, you want to code. Congratulations. You are getting into a rabbit hole that you probably won’t ever be able to leave. There is no coming back from this.
Prerequisites
Accessibility
If you do not have a powerful computer, luck is on your side. There are online services that will let you run a text editor, namely Visual Studio Code, a very popular development environment free of charge in your browser. One of the best is a site called Gitpod. They have a generous free plan.
I, like many other programmers, wrote my first Hello world in Python. For a good while I was having a blast. Python is what brought me into this world and I have to give it some commendation for that. However, over time, I have drifted away from Python. Here’s why.
Simplicity
Syntactically, Python is very simple. This is a great thing for new programmers…or is it? While being easy to understand is important Python’s strangeness makes understanding other languages a bit more difficult. It is almost like Python gives you training wheels, but never let’s you take a leap of faith and gain the full power of riding two wheeled. For example Python’s Dynamic Typing got me accustomed to making variables with little to no thought. Then when I tried languages like Rust and C I was very confused by the idea of static typing.