>>5929211I got an IT degree and been doing it for a long time now (17 years), but it's never too late to get started.
Only the last years are relevant when it comes to the tech used (xp does count for something though).
Since you are a sysadmin I'd start with something that you can also use in your sysadmin job. So I'm thinking a scripting language would be ideal to get going in programming.
You can use that to write short scripts to automate manual tasks like taking backups, provisioning machines etc.
The following scripting languages come to mind:
- Python
- Ruby
- Node (probably less usefull for sysadmin,but it uses JavaScript so that can be used in web dev front end stuff as well).
All these are also useful for writing actual software as well.
I think Python was the most used programming language for 2014 btw, so don't worry about learning something pointless with that one. Ruby is a bit more on the hip side, but it's equally stable these days, there's a great community around it and lots of "gems" (modules/libraries) exist to make your life easier.
The same goes for Node & certainly Python btw.
I'd pick either Python or Ruby myself. I have experience with Python and I love how big the standard library is which makes a lot of system and network related scripting really easy.
C++ is a whole different deal. It's a low level language which means you'll need to understand computers technically (bits, bytes, pointers, memory allocation etc) a lot better than when starting off with a high level language like Ruby, C#, Java, Python etc.
I prefer high level languages myself, but I'm not a hardware guy.
To generalize you'll see that C & C++ are used when you need to program things on the bare metal or they need to be bleeding fast. Think video drivers, hardware device drivers and some games. Nowadays games are written in high level languages too because machines have gotten fast enough to be able to do that.
