I believe that anyone can learn programming you don't need to be a expert in math's or be above a certain age limit. You can learn without spending any money on courses or buying any expensive books. Every thing that you need to learn programming is openly available all over the internet.
Note: This article is focused on high/middle school students but some parts of this article can be useful for anyone.
Why learn programming?
If we forget about doing programming as a job learning programming can help you with other subjects such as Math's and Science. While learning programming you’ll come across terms such as variables, sets, functions which closely resembles mathematical concepts this and being able to graphically simulate and see how the physics formula will be extremely helpful for you to understand them in a completely different level.
How?
First you will have to pick a programming language to start.
A programming language is a formal language comprising a set of strings that produce various kinds of machine code output. Programming languages are used in computer programming to implement algorithms. Most programming languages consist of instructions for computers. — wikipedia.org
There are 2 programming language levels
- High level programming language (languages that is strongly abstracted from the details from the computer)
- Low level programming language (languages that is not abstracted from the details from the computer)
Why are there 2 levels?
High level languages are easier to use and mostly can be ran on different operating systems and cpu’s but low level languages cant they only work in the cpu and operating system that they were designed for high level languages get translated to low level by a program called compiler. Most of the time compilers do a great job of translating them but in a situation that require fast computation high level languages can be inefficient.
Because your learning I recommend learning high level languages.
high level languages can be divided to 2 types
- Strictly typed languages
- weakly typed languages
Why are there 2 levels?
Strictly typed languages are programming languages that you need to specify data types such as bool, int, uint, byte, etc. If you know what these mean then you should start with a high level strictly typed language such as c++, java, swift
Weakly typed languages are programming languages that you don't need to specify types and the interpreter(the software that translates and run the code at the same time) or compiler will detect the data type for you which makes it super easy to quickly convert your idea to a program.
because of this scientists, hackers, data analysts use these type of languages. This is recommended if you don't know what data types are. some examples for languages that are weakly typed are Python, Julia, JavaScript.
Resources
- Python
https://intellipaat.com/blog/tutorial/python-tutorial/
- Julia
- JavaScript
- C++
- Java
- Swift
