One problem I am having here is that I have no sense of your level of competence with programming and with microprocessors. What you said in your Original Post "I have ZERO programming experience" is hard to believe. For all I know you know more about this stuff than I do,
On the other hand, if you really are new to programming and microprocessors I reckon you are starting with code that is far too complicated for a beginner because you are likely to be missing the experience to debug your code.
...R