The best way to learn it, is to set yourself a goal/problem, define as best as possible how many unique issues that problem can be broken into, then start solving them one-by-one, periodically stopping to evaluate how they fit together.

Learning the best languages and structures to use will come as result of this.

Thank you to everyone who commented. You guys are basically geniuses as far as im concerned, and I have a good library of content to look back on now when I have time to get into it. The hardest part will be coming up with a project so simple that I can do it, but one thats interesting enough for me to actually stick with. Maybe something at first like, at 6 pm on Tuesdays, it flashes a gif onscreen. Or maybe a super simple text game.

I write Python for fun, I’m not a programmer. The more you learn, the more you can do. I’ve written a lot of scripts and tools to help me automate tasks I do frequently. It’s a lot of fun to dream up an idea and then make it real, and then later add random features that pop into my head. Windows sucks.

But im not sure how to apply it to anything realistic

I think that’s a misconception a lot of people have: unless you get a job in the field, or get into open source work, you probably won’t. Not at any amount of scale, anyway.

Like, you go to your computer and start working in…what?

For myself, I find that (outside of work and open source) I don’t really USE my programming skills, except that knowing programming enables me to think about problems in my life in a more analytical way. Every once in a while, I might be doing something tedious and techy that I’ll take an hour or two to automate. For example, I’ve done that for re-organizing and renaming video and music files. I also helped my wife a few hundred pages of text from a wiki she maintains for her D&D guild, when they were migrating to a new provider.

im just unsure what people do especially when starting out.

If you have an idea for something that you find interesting or are passionate about or would use personally, great! That’s extremely rare, so don’t stress about it. My go-to recommendation for starter projects is to just re-make something that already exists. That gives you very specific, achievable goals. Specifically" I recommend re-making “dir.exe” or “ls” (the Linux equivalent), which are command-line programs that list files on your computer.

If you can work a project like that, even if you never “finish” it, and you get any enjoyment out of it, that’s a good sign. If you find that you dread working on it, or really struggle with it, then that’s a good indicator that maybe programming isn’t for you. It’s a useful skill to have, but you shouldn’t feel bad if it just isn’t your thing. I always like the idea of being a musician, and toon guitar lessons as a kid, but whenever I would sit down to practice, I found I would rather be doing almost anything else. Eventually, it occurred to me that I can love music and musicianship, without being a musician.

What is really meant by “programming” when people say they like to use linux for it?

I think it’s just a matter of personal preference among the type of people that are drawn to programming. Linux doesn’t just LET you have a very high level of control over things that happen “under the hood”, it often MAKES you have to deal with some things that Windows or iOS would traditionally keep hidden (to varying degrees, depending on distro). That ends up being appealing to the kind of tinkerer folks who are also attracted to programming.

I don’t think there’s any inherent reason that Linux is better for programming, except MAYBE that there’s more of a programming ecosystem built around it, because more programmers end up using it. Sort of a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Like, you go to your computer and start working on…what?

Most of my work goes into an opensource game.

what people do especially when starting out.

Make some apps for yourself. You’ll probably not use them, or even share them, but it’s a good thing to have a vision of what you want to make.

I just want to learn it to know it.

Being a good programmer takes ages. And even then you’ll probably only know a handful of languages and focus on specific branches. If you just want to know it, you’ll lose a lot of interest pretty soon because sometimes it takes days to fix something and you really need to be able to push trough those rough patches and that’s hard without a goal. Imagine trying to become good at woodworking without actually making furniture.

But im not sure how to apply it to anything realistic.

A lot of stuff already has apps for it. And a lot of things are being worked on. People saw the money and a lot of people jumped on the wagon.

The most realistic thing one can do with programming is to make something that does exactly what they want. And that can even be something small. Like learning how to write scripts that automate simple tasks. I suggest high level languages such as Python, PHP, C# or Java to get going. And only look at low level languages such as C, C++, or Rust when you actually start to understand it.

To get started with programming, find a hobby project that you absolutely love working on.

For me it was making websites about pokémon.

Then websites with dynamic content, that players could sign up for and change.

Many years later I started working on game engines

You don’t need Linux to do programming. There are plenty of professionals and hobbyists that use only Windows, or only iOS.

Something like Automate the Boring Stuff might be a good option for what you want. Programming is just another tool to solve a problem.

For example, I hated when I would archive an unread email, it would remain as unread. So I created a script to mark any archived emails as read, and that script runs every couple of hours.

You will never know enough to make a whole program when you never start. Programming small things is very different to big things. You could also try making small changes to big things.

If you use computers enough, from time to time you’ll run into things that make you think “I wish there was a better/easier/faster way to do this”. Then if you know how to program, you can just create a tool to do it for you.

For example, I once made a small calculator app that allowed math on time values instead of basic numbers, so if I did 47*2 it would show 01:34 instead of 94. Some other time I worked some place that played background music all over the building, but something as simple as skipping the current music required going through 4-5 screens in some internal software, so I made a tool that went through those screens for me with a single button click.

So, I make things for myself to replace commercial software that either doesn’t exist or that is becoming (or will become) enshittified like all commercial software.

I like to cook, for instance. It’s a hobby of mine. Cooking, BBQ, grilling, baking, all of it. So of course, I have recipes and they are important to me. I could spend all my time painstakingly entering all my recipes into recipes dot com or whatever, right? But of course, as soon as I do that, their barely usable app that does almost everything I want (and a hundred things I don’t give a shit about) gets updated in the third update of the week (rolleyes) and they have completely changed the UI and on top of that, they removed a feature that I used daily.

OR - I could just make my own fucking app. Which I did. It’s awesome, it does everything I need and nothing I don’t. It also doesn’t update every thirty seconds and become less and less usable or require me to completely overhaul my workflow because the programming staff and middle management need to justify their existences.

I also recently made a wishlist extension for Firefox, because Amazon removed the ability to add non-Amazon items to their wishlist. I have probably a dozen other ideas I’m working on at any given time. None of this is to make money, but just to make my life more convenient and unplug myself from the wider (bullshit) Internet as much as possible.

I like microcontrollers. It is fun to see code do physical things. Plus, you can learn how simple computers work, which helps get an understanding of regular ones. Combine that with home automation, and you have an infinite time sink.

Most embedded systems programming software runs nicely on Linux (or sometimes even exclusively). PlatformIO, Arduino IDE, STM Cube, ESP-IDF… Obviously, something like a Raspberry Pi (and its alternatives) runs Linux itself.

Although, quite often, I find myself saying that since 90% of work and hobbies is either in a browser (including electron) or a shell anyways. Doesn’t really matter how the task bar / dock looks when all you do is run the same 10 programs

I wrote a little bit of code to tell me if or when my electricity would be cheaper if I used on demand pricing instead of flat rate. Basically anything you might use excel for could be a programming problem.

For other hobby projects and “why Linux” it’s easier to sew things together than windows, generally speaking.

Example:

Every time I sit down at my PC the first thing I usually do is open a terminal: it is both my launcher and my file manager. I have several programs with TUI (terminal user interface) or text based API (which is an applied programming interface) and I keep my notes in plain text. One type of note I keep is an “atomic” note inside my zettelkasten (this is a fancy way of keeping track of ideas and the way they connect together, but you need to revisit them for it to be useful. Kinda like anki / spaced reputation I guess).

So enough background, here’s the idea and the programming:

• If I always open a terminal, it’s a good place to put stuff I want to see.

• There are two things I want to see: twice a day I want to see a note, the rest of the time I want to see the 3 or 4 most important tasks on my todo list

• I want randomized notes and I want it to be automatic.

One of the easiest things you can do in a terminal is “echo” text. So I started by, in my terminal “rc” file (the configuration file that tells the terminal what to do when you start it) echoing my todo list as the very last step in the start process. Then it’s refinement. First don’t give me the whole list, use shell tools to show the head of the list. Now make a conditional statement that says “if there’s a file called “temp” in some folder give me the Todo list, otherwise do nothing”. Basically we follow the incremental logic train until you get the final product:

• If no file exists, print a note (at random) and then make the file
• If the file exists write part of the todo list
• Every 6 hours, delete the file automatically with cron

Neat you just programmed a lame, but useful tool.

Sounds like you want a project.

You could try making a game. Python has pygame. Godot is a bit of a steeper learning step but has a lot of capabilities. I’ve messed around with each for fun.

Web dev can also be fun, and a very different style of coding. I’ve made things for a loved one who wanted some things for a site they run. Each thing they asked for took me no more than a day but saved them having to hire someone. I also made a little one-file site that I could share with some people as an RPG reference.

There are also coding games, as in games where you write code as part of the gameplay. These can help in that they give you a goal. Known names include computercraft mod for minecraft, screeps as both mmo and arena battle, Shenzhen I/O and other Zachtronics and zach-like games, The Farmer Was Replaced, etc.

And of course, you can always just think of something. I’ve written a few scripts to do simple edits to files, like ‘open each file in the folder this is run in and change blahblah to bloobloo and increment the version number’ or batch renaming files. Did one to find duplicate files and list them for organization/deletion.

I have other things I’ve started but never finished, but I enjoyed working on them, and they weren’t my job, so no worries.

Instead of a long-winded post, here’s a quick list of stuff that I’ve worked on in my free time over the last few months:

• Some scripts to automatically set some metadata on my photo library
• A tool that grabs a video stream from an HDMI input (from the OS’s point of view that looks just like any webcam), finds text in it and overlays a translation. I use that to play Japanese visual novels on my Switch
• A simple Bubble Shooter game because my gf was frustrated with some bugs in the one she had found online
• A simple 2D game engine and editor inspired by RPG Maker XP
• Updates to the registration website for a community event that I host twice a year
• Updates to a discord bot that automates some dice rolls for my online TTRPG sessions
• A browser extension that helps me scrape some data from a specific website
• Helped a friend port an old website from PHP5 to PHP8

Overall, it’s mostly stuff that is useful for my hobbies for which I can’t find an existing solution that fits my use case.