Sometimes it can seem as though you have to learn computer programming while you're young to ever be successful at it - after all, they're teaching elementary-school children to code these days! It's easy to believe that there's a magical cutoff age after which it's just plain too late to ever learn to code. Some people may place that age at 25, others at 20, and yet others at 12!

This belief has no connection to reality. Like most other skills, computer programming is a discipline that can be learned and honed at any age. I know people over 50 years old with no prior experience in coding who have become quite successful at web development after they've set their mind to master it.

Like all other skills, it takes years of practice to become highly proficient at programming, but you can start your journey at any point in your life. In fact, age can be a benefit to those first learning to code.

How, you ask?

Well, much of programming involves pure common sense, as well as looking at familiar situations from new angles. These are things that people with experience in the world ingrain in their minds increasingly over time. People with worldly experience tend to know how to simplify life's complexities and have a broader outlook on their problems. Programming is all about solving problems, and having the ability to look at the big picture is a boon that those with more life experience are likely to have gained throughout their lives as well as their careers - whatever those may be!

Those of us who are nervous about coding look at a website's source code and say, "Oh, man. That's a bunch of gobbledegook to me. I'll never be able to understand that!" What you don't realize yet is that the gobbledegook is actually a lot of common sense and simple logic. When you learn programming incrementally and methodically, slowly progressing to each next level without trying to jump to the highest rung of the ladder in one step (such as expecting to make sense of your favorite website's source code on day one!), you'll be able to create that supposed gobbledegook yourself and see that coding isn't as hard as it might have seemed.

-Jay Wengrow, Founder of Anyone Can Learn To Code