[nudge]

Kudos for discovering something important about yourself.

Your path forward probably should be determined by the kind of work you want to do, but I think you know this.

Certainly don't be sucked into the new technologies because they're cool. Nor should you necessarily get a CS degree, depending on the work you want to do. You sound like you want to learn everything ever about computing, but that's a recipe for frustration and won't necessarily help you.

But anyway, good luck.

[jrookie]

Thanks for your answer.

I would really like to learn more about machine learning and NLP, after reading a bit about them I found them to be incredibly interesting subjects, however my Math/Algorithms skills are a barrier into understanding most of the concepts, that is why I plan on eventually getting a CS degree.

And yes I agree, it might seem like I'm trying to learn too much at the same time, I'm just incredibly overwhelmed about all of the stuff I've been blatantly ignorant about whilst calling myself a "programmer".

[rors]

I worked as a programmer for many years. I hit 30, felt bored, and am now in graduate school studying NLP.

A lot of people in NLP are awful programmers. We have a group of ML researchers down the corridor and they build all their models in Matlab. You do not need to write great code to do research. It is more important to come up with a well thought out model and then throw together a horrible implementation to show it works.

Math is a very wide and varied subject. A lot of things you'll learn in a CS degree are useless for ML/NLP. Many people argue that ML is just applied statistics, with a sexy name to get more funding.

Finally I think the reason you're feeling stupid is that you're starting to challenge yourself. I spend most of time feeling really dumb in graduate school. Your brain is a muscle and needs constant training. You'll hit plateaus where everything seems like gibberish. Keep it at and you'll be surprised what you can learn.

Good luck.

[nudge]

"Programmer" I think is a little like "scientist". It used to be possible to be an expert in all things, but it's not really any more. So don't be so hard on yourself. You're like a biologist retraining as a chemist.

But since you've found something that fascinates you, go for it!