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mrkramerHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I tried to study IT(lighter version of CS) without any prior programming experience and our first …

I tried to study IT(lighter version of CS) without any prior programming experience and our first programming language was Java because apparently with Java you "Write once, run anywhere". But when I saw Java's syntax, I was like....this is not happening. That was the golden age of mobile apps and our focus was on the mobile development since Web was not sexy anymore. I'm actually happy that I quit because all I heard were horror stories of Java's mobile development on Android. My interest is actually Web development and if I had to choose all over again I would rather learn JavaScript. I can only imagine and speculate how hard it is for someone with no prior CS and programming experience to learn computer architecture, assembly, C and C++ for the first time.

Original discussionComputer science has one of the highest unemployment rates125 source comments · at import
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paxysHN

Even 20 years ago back when I was in college you had a sizable portion of kids who came in to study computer science thinking it would be fun and games. They were then made to study formal logic in their first semester and debug segfaults in gdb in the next, and by the end of the first year pretty much all of them had switched majors. Anecdotally I've heard that very few CS programs even use C++ anymore, and schools now favor Python because students find it more accessible.

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ghaffHN

I took the MIT MOOC CS Intro a few years back for a combination of refresher (though I wasn't actually a CS major) and just to kick the tires. Good Lord, that would have kicked my butt back when I was a freshman absent prior programming experience, admittedly when computer programming was much less a norm than it is today. I had a high school BASIC class but that was about it.

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amy_petrikHN

> But when I saw Java's syntax, I was like....this is not happening. No, you're good, this is the natural reaction of basically all programmers except for those strange beasts known as Java programmers who believe verbosity and needlessly complex yet organized in a twisted sense is nirvana, in the same way the accountant sees the tax return as nirvana. Many other language enthusiasts such as C, python, or LISP, will also get a bad taste for Java. Of course there are other gnarly languages such as APL or SAS.

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