What about learning to code yourself some bit ? You could follow beginner tutorials for the 3-4 most used languages, just enough to be able to do a simple fizzbuzz program, you would get the feel of each quickly.
Granted it would take you a few days, but you could then relate to programmers explaining their choice because of ease of development, performance, compiler errors, etc<p>If you're the one fixing all computers in your family, you also know how a system administrator feels and what he/her dreams of: automation, removing user privileges as much as possible, tools for automation, tools to reproduce an issue without access to the computer and its user, etc.<p>For each major language, Google for "why use X".<p>Ask your developer collegues what's their favorite language and the one they hate the most, nobody will tell you the same reasons. Ask about language choice according to the context/task at hand. You'll have most fun if you can ask this when you have multiple developers around, you're in for a nice informative flamewar.