This week I am reviewing another pattern from the book Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye. For this week’s pattern I decided to go with the chapter “Your First Language”. The context of this chapter is you have a shallow understanding of one or two different programming languages. This chapter grabbed my attention because while I have been in school for four years learning software development, I still feel that I only have a shallow understanding of a few different languages (in this case Java, C, and python, but Java is definitely my strong-suit). I feel that from the perspective of the classroom we know a decent amount about our languages, but from a real-world point of view, we only know the proverbial “tip of the iceberg” meaning that we still have much more to learn about our languages. The problem presented by the book is that we feel that we need to be masters at our first programming language in order to be a good programmer and a purposeful part of your team at work. While the book says that you should not stress over the fact that you only know one programming language, they also point out that most jobs require that you know at least one programming language inside and out to get the job. This is a “catch 22” because jobs expect you to be masters in a language and be extremely proficient but at the same time they understand that you likely have little to no experience with your language because all you have had experience with is programming assignments in school. This kind of puts us at the disadvantage because we are expected to be masters at our trade to get an entry level position at a company we may not be at forever. The solution proposed by the book is to improve your learning of your first language. How does the book propose this? By having actual problems to solve with your programming language skills and knowledge. I think this is important because using your skills to learn how to solve actual problems helps you retain your programming language skills and makes you a better programmer.
From the blog CS@Worcester – The Average CS Student by Nathan Posterro and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.