hi im so sorry to bother everyone but i dont know anything about this site

hello everybody, my name is alex and honestly i am very confused. i found this forum through a link somewhere and i just keep clicking things because i want to learn how programming works but nothing makes sense yet. does anyone have advice for where someone like me should start? i don't want to be annoying or ask stupid questions but im genuinely lost. thanks so much

oh hey no worries at all and honestly I love that you're asking because I remember when I first got here and it was basically like being dropped into a foreign country where everyone speaks fluent internet but none of the instructions were written down in English -- well maybe not literally in English since this is an English-speaking forum but my point is that the implicit social contract of every community is its own kind of language. You have to learn who says what and when and which jokes are okay and which ones aren't and I think about that all the time because it reminds me of my first job at a warehouse in 2014 where there was this one employee named Dave who would always say something completely inappropriate at exactly lunch break like he had timed his social failures to coincide with the vending machine -- and everyone just let it go because if you called him out on it during non-working hours it would be awkward which is a specific kind of labor that women have been forced into for decades. That's not really related but everything in this thread feels like Dave energy at some point so I wanted to say welcome and don't worry about knowing anything yet because nobody here was born knowing what 'OP' means or how the threading system works -- you just keep clicking things until it makes sense which is essentially how all human knowledge acquisition functions if you think about it long enough.