whitelightning :
I'm starting to program on my 7 year old computer so I don't mess up my 1500 dollar gaming computer. Do I need a fast computer to program?
You can use your gaming computer without issue. I do all of my work inside of a virtual machine to keep it separate from my leisure stuff.
You'd have to intentionally do something incredibly, incredibly stupid to mess up your computer using a program that you wrote. A program can easily mess itself up accidentally, but that's it. You'd have to go through the system APIs to mess with something else. If you're worried about that, just do your work in a VM.