Hey I’m you at almost 40! I was always dev adjacent, but never learned to do much more than basic scripting for work.

I started with a couple books: Chassels intro to emacs lisp and Python the hard way.

Python was helpful for a couple things, but the ecosystem is kind of a disaster. I found just the general emacs config helps quite a bit get your feet wet with lisp likes.

Other people have mentioned Go is a great start point because its simplified, and I’ve definitely found it a lot more helpful than the java and C compliers I tried to learn on in my teens.

The only other thing I’d throw out is Lua, it’s super verbose in a way thats pretty easy to understand. it’s also relatively easy to find programs like wezterm that are configured through lua and offer instant reaponses when you change something and see changes.

Just like any new language it takes time, and some hard work to internalize what youre learning, but I don’t think there’s a too old.

You don’t have to be the best programmer ever to do useful things.

Thank you for this, been hunting for a decent gesture typing option for awhile. Floris board had been decent, but the lack of actual suggestions was brutal to work around.

I laughed a little because I’m not sure I ever grew out of the expectation of everything being a little broken. You are going to learn so much you could have done without.

On a more sober note I’m not sure adding a business model fixes the problem anymore.

If we paid for our anonymity like toll roads or subscriptions we box out people who can’t afford it. Commodity level information isn’t likely to be decreasing in value any time immediately.

If equitable access is also on the list, I don’t see anything but regulation and taxes getting you there. Just look at the steam store prices outside the first world and you have an idea for how poorly it could go.

Welcome to the part of the Internet with a soul.

Seriously if you’re old enough to remember the Internet in terms of users weird passion projects you could do a lot worse than hanging off any part of activitypub.

There’s a lot more people than the old days with technical backgrounds, so there’s a lot more practical stuff.