Warning: picking a language to start with almost stalled me out for 5 weeks, so don't do what I did

William Jones · 2026-11-02T22:00:04.243639+00:00

When I decided to learn to code last fall, I sat at my kitchen table in Akron for five weeks going back and forth between Python and JavaScript. I read blog posts, watched a dozen YouTube videos, made a spreadsheet like a fool, and never wrote one line of actual code the whole time. The thing nobody warned me about is that the choice barely matters at the start, because loops and variables and functions work the same way in both, so I was burning weeks on a decision that would not have changed my first month at all. I finally picked Python because a friend said it reads more like plain English, and by day four I had a little program that tracked my grocery spending. Looking back, the whole delay was fear dressed up as research. Now I keep telling people to pick one by Friday and just type, because the switching cost later is small. Has anyone here gotten stuck in that same loop before they started, and what got you to stop reading and start typing?

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Warning: picking a language to start with almost stalled me out for 5 weeks, so don't do what I did | Coding For Beginners - HW Forums