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
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.
For each major language, Google for "why use X".
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.
