My computer programming history is long, complicated and used up way too much of my time. That said, it became quite valuable at work as a civil engineer and also for a charity I'm working for. It has been my passion since I was a teenager. If you want to learn it, I strongly recommend an online course. Is it worth learning it? Consider these points:
Commercial software is primarily written for the developer to make money, secondarily to suit your purpose
Open source software is primarily written for the programmer to use, secondarily to suit your purpose
Learning a second human language is arguably much harder than learning a computer programming language, especially after you have already learnt one programming language
It all started with a computer game called Descent. I was absolutely obsessed with it as a teenager and became quite good at it. However, I wanted to do more with it and so started hacking the gameplay to give myself more weapons etc. I was also interested in the add-on missions I downloaded from the internet but noticed a lot of them had flaws in them that prevented me from playing them. When attempting to fix them with a mission editor didn't work I resorted to directly modifying them with a hex editor. If you don't know what that means, don't worry - it basically means editing a file in the most raw fashion.
When I became tired of directly modifying my saved gameplay files to cheat I decided to give computer programming a go. However, I did it in possibly the most difficult way possible. I loaned a book 'C Programming on a Mac for Dummies', which was only the most basic starting point. I then proceeded to attempt to learn how to make a program for my Macintosh computer using documentation from Apple. Which was intended for a different programming language, Pascal, and was actually about how to make a window display on a screen. I could not figure out why it wouldn't work and began to learn the programming language C by trial and error until my program roughly did what I wanted. And my program was riddled with errors (bugs).
When I found out the source code for Descent was released I became interested and started tinkering with it. I learnt a bit more about C - from the source code. I finally looked on the internet what it was all about and learnt more things about C. I later also learnt about C++ and SQL. SQL in particular was very useful when I was working at City of Mandurah, as I was frequently working with structured data like information about roads.
And now I am learning JavaScript. Fortunately, it is quite similar to C++, but arguably simpler, and so is relatively easy for me to learn. And most usefully, I can use it for this website! And I am brimming with ideas. Watch this space 😁