I don’t have a study to cite on long term bias, but Scripps used to be newsy which used to be at least serviceable for what amounted to AP syndication.
I didn’t have a clue they were still around till just this instant, but at least the foundation is not something that sprung up yesterday as a Russian puppet.
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.