Nobody knows everything. Pick something you're genuinely interested in and learn about it in earnest.

>buying a C64 a few years ago
>bought a vic-20 too
Are you a time traveler? Or just interested vintage hardware?

I don't think BASIC is a good language to start with nowadays. In fact arguably it wasn't even a good language to start with back then, quoting Dijkstra
>"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

>Had some experience with python in my physics class
Python's good to start with, probably among the best balance there is in terms of batteries included languages, conciseness without being a game of code-golf, and having good abstractions to accommodate essentially any programming paradigm (objected oriented, functional, etc.). But more importantly since you already know a little bit, just keep doing that. I assume if you used it in physics you'll have used python in a scientific computing context via numpy which is pretty great. It honestly doesn't matter what you do, just keep learning and applying things. Curiosity and willingness to learn is the most important thing.

>that didn't last long cuz I dropped that major the next semester lol.
Nit: please take time to type out words and elide the interjection, this isn't a stream-of-consciousness post, treat it more like email than a chat.

>some kind've a general idea about what the fuck you guys are saying sometimes
I don't know which particular posts you're referring to here, but do be aware that /navi/ here is a lot more broadly scoped than programming as you might find on other boards (e.g. /g/) [which is as it should be, since quite honestly people on /g/ like to talk more about linux distributions than anything having to do with programming]. Your goal (and really the ultimate goal for anyone interested in computing) should be to understand things from the lowest level up to the highest level. Of course this is an unsurmountable goal, so pick and choose the subtopics you're interested in, dive deeply into those, and try to maintain a broad awareness of the others. It's not something you can learn within a month, or even within a year, acquiring enough knowledge to be able to reason about things down from bare architecture level up to distributed systems will take at least a decade or more.

>>2994
Thanks for the advice, that physics class was 5 years ago, so I doubt I'll even remember anything from python. I'll try to find something I like.

Yes, a few years ago I had an obsession with vintage computers. I think it spawned from an obsession with the vaporwave genre, but it was very genuine and I still am fascinated by the aesthetic of older computers till this day. I forgot to mention I also bought a Toshiba 3100/20 that has some error message I was gonna fix, but never did as finding info about that computer isn't easy. I still have that computer too. Are there any subtopics pertaining to that kinda thing? I doubt I still remember anything about python at this point.

>>3010
>subtopics pertaining
You mean restoring vintage computers? There's a decent amount of people into retrocomputing (not on TC but elsewhere on the internet), and you don't even necessarily have to know anything about programming to do that. In fact having some soldering knowledge will probably be more useful since you'll probably need to replace bad capacitors and such. But I'm not sure what people do with them once they get it running.

>>3011
Good point haha, I guess the only real thing you can do is mess with software formats that aren't compatible with today's computers. I have a lot of old floppy discs I'd love to check out. Maybe even buy some vintage games and run them on their original hardware for that authenticity. I'm not too sure haha, but I know for sure it spikes my interest. What interested you and what subtopic do you thrive in?

>>3012
>what subtopic do you thrive in?
I wouldn't say I'm interested in a particular subfield more than any other, I find all of them interesting and will eagerly seek out opportunities to learn more about them.

>What interested you
I don't really remember. I think it's just that I spend a lot of time on the computer, so it was a motivation to know enough to be able to have unilateral control over my environment. And to be able to confidently mess around with things, you need to know how they work.

My issue with programming is that I am extremely stubborn and can't focus on things that I have no interest in. So, in python class for example, when they tell me to code something that figures out how to perform some sort of function based around division of numbers or whatever, I just lose interest. If the language were written in such a way that classes, objects, strings etc were called "swords", "spells", "dragons" etc I would be more mentally stimulated and pay attention...