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Can you be too old to start learning to be a decent programmer?
"If you wait to teach them until college, it's almost always too late; adult brains generally can't form the deep structures necessary to learn real programming, only rote copy-paste code monkeying."Uhh... seriously is that true?
The same sort of thing can be applied to learning spoken languages. Apparently younger minds can grasp things like this easier, but that's not to say that everyone at college level won't be able to learn programming. It might just be harder than if you learnt it when you were younger.
Or so they say...
I stumbled upon programming in college when I was 23, but don't feel inferior (as a programmer) to others only because they started when they were 12. That said, I've spent considerable amount of time practicing, possibly more than I would have if I was younger, but mostly because I've enjoyed it so much.
I think it's more a you-either-have-it-or-you-don't kind of thing, rather than age related. I tried to teach my wife the basics, but she did not have it ;-).
Gaining experience takes time though, so don't wait too long.
I guess the same can be applied to any new thing that we learn the older we are the more slower or tougher for us to learn somethine new, forget just a programming language.
I'm 26 - not old old, but not college young. I started learning to program about 2 years ago and I'm not having any problems. I'm loving it and I'm learning new stuff every day.
I think it's useful to have some of the high-level stuff already in your brain, like abstraction, problem solving etc. That probably set me up nicely.
I can give you my humble opinion.
The more we get old, the less receptive we become, and learning becomes harder and harder.
Programming is all about logic, and a little math sometimes. In my experience I saw that artistic oriented people can't really get a hold of programming concepts, while pragmatic and logical people have an easy time learning the principles.
It's just my opinion anyway...