True Confessions

 CONFESSION: This is not my first attempt at learning to code. It's been years. And now that I'm over 70 years of age, the learning process is a whole different experience. Perhaps my shared frustrations will help others traveling up the learning curve in their later years.

Back Story: Back in my 40's, I registered for a college night course to learn what was a new programming language for me. (They called it 'C' if you must know.) 


The class demographics (mainly men) could have been neatly divided into three groups: (1) The 20-30 somethings, (2) The 40-50 ones, and (3) The over-the-hill 65+ elders.


No sooner did the teacher start delving into C language syntax than the hands went up.

Yup. It was the 65+ elders.

"Could you repeat that?" 
"Can you go slower?"
"I don't understand what you mean by that!"

It was clear in that very first class session that we were going to have a crash and burn scenario for our senior citizens. The teacher became agitated.

"I've got a schedule to meet," he said, "We need to move on to the next chapter by next week. Maybe you can see me after class?"

The 20-somethings were unfazed. Soaked it up like sponges. As for myself, at age 40 I was having a bit of a struggle. I knew deep down that I could apply the learning skills of my undergraduate years to play catch up by studying at home and ultimately, I would 'get it'. Not to brag, but yes; in the end I aced the course. Most of the 65+ crowd flunked out.

Flash forward to the present. Somehow I've gotten it into my head that I am going to learn Python in my 70's. And also catch up on that CSS stuff they've added to the old HTML. And maybe pick up on a few new fangled things that somehow slipped by while I was focused on my day job. Am I crazy? Am I too old? Stay tuned and we will find out.

More to Explore

 This section will be built up in the future. The idea is to link to further materials related to the above even if I hadn't myself yet looked at them.  YouTube search results re "Too Old to Code".  Google search results re "How Old is to Old to Learn Coding".  Google search results re "When are you too old to learn new tricks?"
You Tube search result: Learning to code at 70?
Too Old To Learn Programming?


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Lied

Image
I lied. Back in Post number one ( click here to see it ), I implied that I was just another old geezer learning Python. I kind of promised that I would take readers along with me on this senior citizen's journey while learning the language. But then I went off on my own without logging my journey. It went fast. Part of the reason is that some 40 years ago I was a computer engineer. I coded in something called, "assembly language" ( never mind ) and even soldered in the digital logic chips into the hardware. So it was misleading to say I knew nothing about computers or software engineering and I would be advancing at the speed of a complete noob. In 1980 I joined the "Dark Side" as they say in the Star War movies. Rather than staying in the tech world, I went to law school.  I haven't coded much since then. I lost touch with the coding world. Much has changed in the interim. Today we have all these free and wonderful YouTube videos that teach all manner of ...
Read more

Git-ten Up to Speed

Image
I'm learning by way of the school of hard knocks that even I, with my very simplistic self-imposed Python project, need help with version control. Let me back up. I created a very simple Python script that asks the user for opinions about various You Tube tutorials, and in the process of collecting answers to queries about the tutorial, starts assembling HTML plus CSS code for posting as a help Tab on my browser. The simple minded script asks the user questions like, 'How many out of 5 stars do you give to the overall quality of this tutorial?' and 'Please copy to the clipboard, the URL of the tutorial and its title'. All these little bits of information get assembled into an HTML/CSS tagged snippet that I want to append to a growing collection of reviews expressed in HTML code. 'Wait a minute,' I said to myself.  (Kudos to Meme-Gen'er) 'Every user input should be tested for validity.' 'And this issue will occur with every future program!...
Read more