When I started, back in the dark ages there weren’t many programming languages about. It was a choice of BASIC, Fortran, C, Pascal and Cobol or some obscure languages apl, lisp, snobol etc. At Uni I learnt BASIC in first year then Pascal. We touched on Cobol in one course, enough to put me off it for life. We also did one semester on assembly language for a 6800 CPU. That was fun and probably helped me to learn 6502 and Z80 a few years later.,

Back then once I started learning other languages, it was long before the web existed. Programming languages came with manuals – user guides, reference guides. So you could learn enough to get started and then dip into the reference guide as and when you needed.

But since the Web appeared, the manuals no longer exist as printed books. But what I’ve noticed is, it gets harder to acquire a new technology if you are not working in it fulltime. I learnt PHP and HTML twenty years ago and reinforced that learning by creating websites. But now technologies like Blazor and ASP.NET MVC are quite a bit more complicated.  I’m doing  Udemy course on Blazor with over 200 lessons (most about 5 minutes long) and have only got up to lesson 55. Finding the time is probably one of the hardest things.

C is probably one of the easiest programming languages to learn but any other language or complicated technology is going to take a lot longer. I think It should be easier. There is an immense amount of free material on the web including sites to pose questions (StackOverflow), low cost courses (Udemy), free videos (Youtube) and yet it doesn’t seem easier.  Back pre-web you had to pay for programming languages. But unless you are a student or have a lot of spare time to study, it can be slow learning new stuff.