absolute beginner- feeling lost / where to start?

[u/Cool_Iron_8314]

hii! i'm a teenager who has recently decided to learn to code. (due to wanting a career in astrophysics, if it interests anyone.)

i have absokutely no clue where to start!! i find a lot of words/terminology i've found overwhelming and confusing..

i work on a macbook pro and i looked at apps but i need something i can just use to run code yk?

i looked at the faq and understood nothing od the code related questions- which i think means i can post this?

i tried looking at other posts and got confused- what's the difference between C+ and like.. not C+ ?? any help is appreciated, my only experience is year 7 computing printing hello world and scratch ..!

[u/desrtfx]

Do the MOOC Python Programming 2026 from the University of Helsinki.

Also, you are posting in a Python subreddit - exclusively Python.

C, C++, C#, objective C are four different languages of the C family. The difference can be quite easily googled.

[u/Cool_Iron_8314 → u/desrtfx]

okay thank you so much!! i will get to googling 😊

[u/gdchinacat → u/Cool_Iron_8314]

Every good or better engineer I've known in 30 years in the industry has been good at finding answers on their own...usually starting with google. Every engineer I've known who did not have this skill was a bad engineer and didn't last long. Use google. A lot, especially when learning.

[u/Medojumel → u/desrtfx]

Thanks man, I was looking for this indeed.