An anonymous reader writes: Dear Slashdot,
I've enjoyed this community off and on since the late 1990s, yet I'm submitting as AC because I'm embarrassed of my situation. When I was 11, I scraped up enough money to buy a used Commodore 16 for the sole purpose of learning to program BASIC. Some years later (mid 1990s), I got into Linux, and dabbled a little bit in C, Perl and even some basic shell scripting. I didn't get too far into it before my working life (and believe it or not, women) ate up all my time. Programming is one of those things that I'm always interested in, but never had the time for. In a few years, I will finish my degree and start a new career (going into Medicine, not IT). I've decided that once I'm done with school, I will *make* the time to finally get into programming. Problem is, I'll be a few years past my 40th birthday at that point. I'm not interested in programming for career purposes (personal entertainment, mainly- just want to model some of this microbiology, physiology, molecular physics and such, as well as write some simple games and program some microcontrollers) yet I am afraid that since I'm getting into this late (the stuff as a pre-teen is so long ago it doesn't count anymore) that I'll never be effective at it. I know the brain changes as you get older, but has anyone else ever started programming at such a late stage in life? Can you still be effective and decent at it, or am I going to be staring at my vi session like my grandfather used to stare at his TV remote in total bewilderment? Is there any hope for non-geeks like myself that want to play in your world? Thanks and bacon planks.