Programming languages are all quite similar to each other. They’re similar enough that if you learned one language, you’d have a better time understanding another language.
Many, many years ago my interest first piqued with scripting in Roblox. Roblox scripts are in a modified version of Lua (henceforth, Roblox Lua). For the most part though, I wasn’t actually writing new scripts. Instead, I was reading a lot of the scripts from other assets I was using, and was modifying portions of them to get my intended result (which would often require more substantial changes than just changing numerical values).
But that was just my Roblox Lua experience. During this time, I would also just mess around with attempting to create stuff in programs like GameMaker Studio.
Another more notable experience comes from my time on the wiki. Wikicode itself should be pretty straightforward, but combining it when you start adding on ParserFunctions and Arrays it starts to look quite a bit like “actual code”. Then extensions like Scribunto are straight-up allowing the usage/creation of Lua scripts. That was all a much more unguided experience than Roblox Lua, as with Roblox I was changing much less and often referred back to other scripts or videos.
Regarding formal education, I’ve taken a Python class and I am currently taking a C++ class. My textbook is C++ Programming by D. S. Malik.
It depends on how quickly you want to learn. A formal education would jumpstart you, and intro courses are usually quite good at starting from “almost no prior experience”. I never got a formal education until much more recently, but I enjoy tinkering with things enough to have still learned a fair amount prior to my education.