Squinty wrote:I'd like to start programming in general, but I can never figure out where to begin with it. I've looked into different languages and I've had a bash at Python, but for someone completely inexperienced, I found it a bit tough to grasp the concepts.
I see you've already found decent tutorials and suchlike, so I wanted to give some help with the "conceptual" side of it if I can.
Programming is all about breaking down problems into a set of tiny steps. The programming language provides you with a basic set of "things you can do" (like add a number to another number, or print some text to the screen), so the game is to take the problem you want to solve and keep breaking it up until the list of steps you're left with only has those "things you can do" in it.
Start out small. Like, the classic example is "Hello world", which might look a bit like:
write("Hello, world!")And you might want to modify that so it says "Hello, [a name that the user inputs]!". Another of the basic operation of the language might be "read" to read in something the user types. So you think, I need to ask the user for a name, read it, add all the bits of the sentence together, then print it:
write("What is your name?")
name = read()
output = "Hello, " + name + "!"
write(output)Programming languages are all optimised for a different set of problems. Python is a general-purpose language for building all kinds of software and (with Pygame) games. AAA game development is mostly C++; "Business enterprise applications" are often Java, sometimes C#; Julia is for machine learning; Bash is good at Linux system administration tasks; embedded systems are usually C. There's a standard set of languages for web front-end development - HTML, CSS, JavaScript - and web back-end development is still mostly done with PHP.
If you want to learn programming for programming's sake, Python is definitely a good choice. If you're interested in a particular problem domain, consider learning the languages associated with that field. Of the languages I've mentioned, C and C++ are quite hard - I would be tempted to dip my toes in with Python, Java, or C# first - but the rest aren't considered inherently difficult languages to learn.