Word of warning to anyone learning to code: your biggest enemy will be motivation, not the inherent difficulty of programming.

Programming languages have always been designed to resemble US English.

MOV AL, 1h        ; Load AL with immediate value 1 
MOV CL, 2h        ; Load CL with immediate value 2 
MOV DL, 3h        ; Load DL with immediate value 3 

A sample of assembly code, still resembling English despite the limitations

In the past, programming languages were more complicated due to their tight coupling with memory management and threading, amongst other things.

Java was one of the first languages to use garbage collection, throwing things away that are no longer needed, thereby freeing up memory for new things.

Ah, fond memories

In keeping a tight control of memory usage, people obviously had to specify what sort of values were being held everywhere − is myThing an integer? Is it a Boolean (true/false) value? Is it a series of characters? Python is a popular language that ignores this distinction; instead deciding the types during execution, so programmers needn’t be burdened by specifying the information that “should already be obvious”.

Python is popular and it closely resembles US English, so there should really be no debate that it’s the best language for beginner programmers.

StackOverflow survey of programming languages, 2019. Note that HTML, CSS, SQL and Shell scripts can only be used in very specific scenarios; they are not generally considered as “programming languages”.

In staying motivated, you really need a project that excites you. I would argue that you can perform better at pretty much any job through a knowledge of programming.

With that in mind, I created this demonstration of Jupyter notebooks.

In this scenario, there’s a business analyst working alongside a code monkey, with both of them writing code. They’re analysing what’s going to happen with their nation’s upcoming pork exports, all the while generating a report from their findings.

Imagine if your business assumptions could be run on a regular basis.

Were you assuming that your trading partner had viable farm land?

Were you assuming that your trading partner’s culture followed a religion that allowed pork imports?

I left plenty of extra tasks to do here and I encourage you to dive in; building upon what I’ve implemented so far:

owen9825/jupyter_demo

Pork exports from Kamaria are depending on you!