This is a thread for people who want to learn programming, whether they are non-programmers, beginners, or advanced programmers who want to learn more. If you would like to discuss programming with other people from the LW community, this is the right place.

While programming is not a central topic of this website, it is related to many ideas discussed here. About a third of LW users described their profession as "Computers" in the recent survey. Some users have expressed desire to learn programming. Some users have recommended learning programming to others. There are many other websites (or books, etc.) for learning programming, but talking with the people you already know, following our traditions of rational discourse, could be an advantage.

So this is the experiment. Unlike Open Thread, it has a specific topic, and the beginners are encouraged to ask their programming questions, even if they are completely unrelated to the usual LW topics. Especially the open-ended questions like "how...?" and "why...?". (Maybe we are already strong enough to survive even the mindkilling questions like "which programming language is the best?".)

Here are some older LW articles about programming:

Here are some other resources:

Computer Science @ Khan Academy
Project Euler - problems to test your programming skills
Stack Overflow - for specific questions

...and there are also many links within the articles.

And here is the place for your questions: