Summary
It takes around two to six months to learn the fundamentals of programming, but one can learn enough to write their first short program in a matter of minutes.
1
Developing mastery of programming can take months or years.
1
A reasonable timescale to learn the basics of programming is around six weeks
2
, which includes learning variables and numbers, strings and string manipulation, logic, conditional flow, and while loops, and data structures and for-loops.
2
According to
