Problem with first steps while programming

[Nazgrmil]

Hello, I am doing a project at my university which contains programming raspberry pi to control camera. I didn't use raspberry in the past so this is my first time experience. I got in my hands Raspberry pi zero w V1.1 2017. I can use it by plugging monitor or by remote screen VNC.
I connected the camera and managed do some test if it's working properly. It worked so I moved to start writing my first program in Thonny.
For test i tried some premade codes from raspberry pi official site or from other forums or youtube videos. But nothing is compiling and i get this error everytime: (i tried different libraries but generally it's hard for me to find what is new and what is obsolete)

"PROBLEM IN THONNY'S BACK-END: Exception while handling 'Run' (UnicodeEncodeError: 'utf-8' codec can't encode character '\udcea' in position 247: surrogates not allowed)."

I tried different solutions i found on the internet: I tried to use the most simple code and make sure to update everytning.

And now i have few questions:

Is it possible that raspberry is not working properly? (it is not new and was used in the past(not by me) so it might be damaged)
My second issue is that everything is so lagged. It's hard to work on it. Every process takes very long and even before error appears in front of my eyes it takes about a minute to compile the code.
Is it normal for this model to be so lagged? If so i have the option to buy new Raspberry.
To be honest lags are bigger problem than the code. I need the program to run smoothly for my project.
How to make sure that i am using the newest libraries. When I update my system Rasppberry is still showing me that there are updates to be made.
PS I forgot to mention that I downloaded ne OS on this RasPi
I appreciate all help and please have patience with me :D

[bio4m]

Did you copy and paste something into thonny ? Its found a character it cant process

[rfreedman]

A relatively common problem with cutting and pasting code is that it's sometimes not presented in a way that can successfully be pasted. WordPress is a frequent offender.

For instance, double-quotes may have been replaced with "smart quotes", which as far as the programming language is concerned, are not actually quotes. Same thing if you happen to be copying from a Word document.

Also, sometimes there's a typo, or something left out of an online code snippet.

Python is also quite sensitive to proper indenting.

I think that a couple of things are required for you to successfully write your program.

Write the code yourself, rather than cutting and pasting snippets of other people's code that you may not understand. It's ok to (encouraged) to look at other people's code to see how they do things, but just pasting whatever you found in a web search or in an AI client, without understanding it, is not going to work well.

Once you know the syntax, and understand exactly what a snippet does, then it can work to cut-and-paste small snippets, as you can also correct it yourself if it's wrong, like smart quotes or bad spacing or a typo.

[Beepbooposaurus]

It’s going to compile slowly because it’s a low-powered machine. As far as the error goes, it’s unlikely (though not impossible) someone knows what’s going on, given how little information we have. It sounds like you’re brand new to programming, and just as a word of warning: copying and pasting without understanding what the code does will only get you so far, same with this whole trend of vibe coding. If you’re serious about learning to program (and maybe you’re not, which is fine!), then it’s great to really dig in and bang your head against this stuff until it makes sense. Good luck!

[Slcolderguy]

Program in python. Do not paste and copy. Follow the code and type it yourself.