>>12053325>Perhaps slightly stereotypically for someone who has just started programming, I find ML etc. those kinds of topics very appealing.>Though I accept that those things are far beyond my capability currently, and have been sticking to just learning one language well.Yes, start out with the basics of software engineering and programming before trying to get into ML. ML is going to continue to grow (it's simultaneously overhyped and underrated, kind of) and it can be applied to do really cool things that would otherwise take exponentially more time and effort to accomplish. It's kind of a new programming paradigm: instead of writing a program, you write a program that takes a lot of data and generates its own program far better than anything you or a giant team of people could ever write, and in much less time.
It still takes tons of competence and skill to find and process the data correctly and tune the system, but paradoxically it actually kind of makes programming more accessible, not less, because the computer is now itself doing the vast majority of the programming. You still need to understand the fundamentals of programming, but you could be a kind of shitty programmer and still produce great results if you're good at the other parts of ML (including statistics).
>I found out later in life that I quite like maths and see programming as a kind of an entry step into a field where I could possibly drag myself towards more and more difficult topicsIf you enjoy math, there's still tons and tons of programming that works very closely with math. There are so many programming jobs and fields out there that you don't need math if you want to avoid it, but math and programming do absolutely still go hand-in-hand for a massive list of fields. Just depends on what you want to do. Unless you want to be a pure/theoretical mathematician/computer scientist, I'd first focus on picking a field (e.g. biology, chemistry, energy, security, communications, etc.).
