I’m a 50+ year old physician who has always loved the idea of programming (my father was a systems analyst on mainframes in the 70s) but I was too busy with my main job. I’m interested in learning now, though.
I’m not sure what I want to do, perhaps create a medical calculator for estimating stroke risk based on risk factors or make an automaton for playing board games by myself (euro games like Wingspan). I definitely am looking for a general purpose programming language.
My journey has been fairly meandering so far. I started with Python since that’s what the internet says for a hobbyist like myself.
Then I did a bit of Javascript because I thought, “How would I easily share stuff with my friends and family?”, and web is more convenient.
Then I switched to C# because I read that dynamically typed languages are safer and .NET is very general purpose (can do anything from games in Unity to web with something called Blazor). However, I hate the syntax of C# and I missed the easy syntax of Python/Javascript.
Thus I ended up Googling “Python but with static types” and ended up reading about Kotlin.
I’ve only done up to about 3-4 weeks in each language, so I know flow control and the basics of OOP (I stopped just after starting that). I have also read and understand that language doesn’t matter and that digging in and learning programming concepts is the most important part.
A lot of posts focus on career oriented motives for choosing a language but that doesn’t matter to me at all. So, in summary, looking for a Python/JS like “simple syntax” language that is general purpose… for a hobbyist… has lead me to Kotlin. I’ve already started and am having fun with it. Are there any objections or advice for another language that might suit my purposes better? I need to stop procrastinating, I know.
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