The most important lesson I ever learned as I was starting out in software engineering came from my Design Principles teacher, during my short stint at a community college. That was a class which was technically not associated with a specific programming language, though the same teacher also taught various programming classes in different languages. She also wrote her own textbook for that Design class, actually… I still have my prepublication copy of it somewhere, that she had handed out to the entire class for free that semester. To this day, I still have a great deal of respect for that teacher. But I digress.
The lesson I learned from her was this: Programming languages are just tools like any other. Tools come and go over the years. The skills that you learn which will last beyond whatever language you’re learning and using right now are going to be things like how to construct good logic and how to structure a meaningfully intuitive user interface. These are the things that you should focus on perfecting first and foremost, rather than the syntactical nuances of any given language. If you have a good design at the outset, everything else should fall into place much more easily.
Welcome to the fold! Be warned: coders tend to be a weird bunch of folks.
The most important lesson I ever learned as I was starting out in software engineering came from my Design Principles teacher, during my short stint at a community college. That was a class which was technically not associated with a specific programming language, though the same teacher also taught various programming classes in different languages. She also wrote her own textbook for that Design class, actually… I still have my prepublication copy of it somewhere, that she had handed out to the entire class for free that semester. To this day, I still have a great deal of respect for that teacher. But I digress.
The lesson I learned from her was this: Programming languages are just tools like any other. Tools come and go over the years. The skills that you learn which will last beyond whatever language you’re learning and using right now are going to be things like how to construct good logic and how to structure a meaningfully intuitive user interface. These are the things that you should focus on perfecting first and foremost, rather than the syntactical nuances of any given language. If you have a good design at the outset, everything else should fall into place much more easily.