I wanna learn coding

[ALEKKELEK]

Halo so i’m a law student from Indonesia, nothing tech-related at all, but lately I’ve been weirdly interested in programming. i kinda wanna learn coding by myself maybe even build a small game one day (if my brain survives it).

problem is... i have absolutely no idea where to start. like, what do I need to prepare? which platform’s good for beginners? and where do people even learn this stuff YouTube, online courses, or some dark corner of the internet I don’t know about?

Any advice or guidance would be super appreciated. Thanks a ton in advance!
– manusiahomoerectus

[DarkCrystalMethod]

Qbasic was the best basic. Obviously it stole the name from the original historical BASIC language. Microsoft didn't need to remove this from Vista and later and had no real reason to either.

[Corvus XIII]

Originally posted by DarkCrystalMethod:

Qbasic was the best basic. Obviously it stole the name from the original historical BASIC language. Microsoft didn't need to remove this from Vista and later and had no real reason to either.

10 print"Hello"
20 GOTO 10
30 REM MOHAHAHHAAHHAHAAAA!

[パエトーン (Belle)]

Originally posted by Houseman:

I'd recommend you learn JavaScript. Do not confuse this with Java, they are two different languages. JavaScript is the most versatile and the most forgiving.

Just Google up a "learn JavaScript" tutorial. Text based is preferred over a YouTube video.

Absolutely diabolical advice. They want to be a game dev, not a minimum wage front-end developer.

OP should try learning C#. Purchase a beginner's book. Read it. Code along with its examples. In the meantime, you can start here.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/tour-of-csharp/tutorials/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/csharp-for-beginners/

[パエトーン (Belle)]

Originally posted by El Mythical 23 k.s.c.:

Originally posted by Fajita Jim:

I'm an old COBOL grunt. I'm going to stop you right there.

Because the answer depends on the following:

-Do you want to learn coding as a means to a career?
-Do you want to learn coding as a hobby and maybe a side gig?

If you want a career, COBOL is basically straight to the the six digit salary. But it's probably the least forgiving language ever invented.

If you want to code as a hobby, try something like RUBY. A lot of retro games and tings like RPGMaker use RUBY so there's a much larger community out there than you'll find for COBOL.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I didn't realize they update COBOL. I might have to learn this. I just presumed it was going to be phased out at some hard cut off.

Most of the world's financial systems still use COBOL.

[Triple G]

Originally posted by パエトーン (Belle):

Most of the world's financial systems still use COBOL.

A wise man once said that one doesn´t want to work for companies which use COBOL. Like financial institutes, insurances, the government.

And apparently any job would be to manage some big, decades old code, which someone else wrote. So it´s not really about coding or programming, rather adjusting.

[Pumpaholics Anonymous]

I'm learning Java through BlueJ (a free program) right now. Learning individual commands is one thing, but coding as a whole? That’s a different beast. It’ll test your ability to visualize how commands interact and how logic flows through equations.

My advice? Grab a book or download a set of exercises (there’s tons online). Read, then practice. Practice again. Compare your answers with the solutions. Rinse and repeat until the concepts click.

Each week, tackle a new concept. If it’s a big one, take two weeks. Aim for 3 hours of theory and 7–10 hours of practice per week (more if you’re feeling it). Once a month, take on a coding task — something that forces you to combine multiple concepts. It might take you two or three weeks to crack it, and that’s fine.

Right now, I’m building a Java program that reads pseudocode from a text file, fixes its indentation, formats reserved keywords (upper/lowercase), and enforces strict input validation, structure, and style rules. I’m still a beginner, so this’ll probably take me a solid week. But hey — sometimes you sleep on it and wake up with the answer.

Also, listen to the first guy. My prof once said COBOL programmers are rare and in demand — solid pay, too. So yeah, you got this, brochacho.

PS — Activate that blue light filter. Coding’s a visual marathon.

[Acetyl]

Learn C, basically. The tasks you do in programming are no different than daily life.

Originally posted by Acetyl:

I think everyone learning to program should first (or in parallel) learn binary notation, converting binary to decimal and the inverse, bitwise manipulation, and then learn briefly the gist of how RAM (volatile storage) works, how ram is read into the CPU cache in cache lines, and therefore how this (contiguous storage and patterned data access) ties into data locality and performance. Knowing about RAS and CAS signals (row address select, column address select) helps visualize why the CPU interacts with the memory controller the way it does. After this a person fully understands pointers and so on, and the tradeoffs with accessing elements of an array by an array of pointers (non-local, data is not contiguous in memory) or having the data right there. This is often treated as too complex and arcane, but having some understanding of locality and what's actually happening when you have memory on the stack vs heap contiguous vs dereferencing a pointer to non-contiguous storage. Also it's very slow and expensive to request heap storage from the OS, relatively speaking.

-Bitwise manipulation and binary notation
-Cache lines and memory locality
-Registers and some basic understanding of an instruction set (eg x86)
-Data structures and performance re locality
-Cost of calls to eg malloc / new, minimizing them and unneccesary data copying
-A bit about branch prediction, and how a design theoretically could influence it (not reliable)

There was a really good free book I read about this way back but I've forgotten now. Not intending to make this sound way more complex than it really is, it's actually pretty straightforward.

[Maverick]

Learn Javascript and React/React-Native and THINK somewhat before you bang out code! Learn how to structure your code/logic properly. React will help enforce that by design.

Good code design, keeping everything in tight, elegant, reusable little functions and components makes the night and day difference between coding being hell on earth versus fun and pleasurable.

[Wumbo]

python is my recommendation

c++ is the easiest language, it is quite old
i have ever learnt assembly language, i didnt understand but it was also fun

btw
coding in mac sounds cringe to me, i mean get a powerful pc

[ZOMBIECRUNCH]

I don't recommend python.

[Maverick]

Originally posted by Wumbo:

python is my recommendation

c++ is the easiest language, it is quite old
i have ever learnt assembly language, i didnt understand but it was also fun

btw
coding in mac sounds cringe to me, i mean get a powerful pc

my man, lol, I code on mac. Coding on an Apple Silicon Mac is good because you can develop for anything.

You can code in any language and develop Mac platform apps, which you can’t do with any other system. Mac gives you everything you love from Linux too.

[Pumpaholics Anonymous]

Originally posted by Maverick:

Originally posted by Wumbo:

python is my recommendation

c++ is the easiest language, it is quite old
i have ever learnt assembly language, i didnt understand but it was also fun

btw
coding in mac sounds cringe to me, i mean get a powerful pc

my man, lol, I code on mac. Coding on an Apple Silicon Mac is good because you can develop for anything.

You can code in any language and develop Mac platform apps, which you can’t do with any other system. Mac gives you everything you love from Linux too.

All my teachers code on a mac, now I understand why. Honestly don't get where the mac hate came from. My PC’s got specs for days and still chokes on BlueJ.