Like many, my programming career (however short and mundane) began in my freshman year. From learning how to operate the shiny-new Microsoft Word in one class and counting binary numbers in another, I meandered my way through the various introductory courses utterly convinced that computer science couldn't get any more dull. Luckily I wasn't proven wrong when things picked up and I actually got to learn Java. I thought the language was easy to pick up and the syntax wasn't overly confusing. I thought it was fun and I absolutely loved writing unnecessarily large blocks of (functioning) code - it made me feel super sophisticated and awesome. Everything sort of took a dip in my next class.
Java 2 with Dr. Sam Joseph. I have to admit that he broke my heart when he said that Java was being overshadowed and sort of left in the dust by other programming languages like C and C++. I was growing accustomed to my self-appointed title of Java master! But his words did not sway me from being the best programmer I could possibly be. To the say least, the class was challenging. Keeping track of all the variable names and declarations across multiple files was a hassle. Doing everything in a timely fashion also proved to be quite pressuring since I also had to balance work for my other classes. And if it wasn't the time constraint, it was the proper syntax (those accursed curly braces) and documentation were that my greatest adversaries. All in all, it was fun -but I sort of lost my interest in being the self-proclaimed Java master in the process. While I do think I did fairly well in his class, I felt humbled knowing that there was a lot left for me to learn, and even more for me to master.
In the passing months between the end of Java 2 and the beginning of this class, I acquainted myself with a couple other languages like Python and C++ (courtesy of code academy). I must say, it is MUCH easier to code in these languages than it is in Java. From whatever bits I've gleaned, I quickly learned that everything is shorter and cleaner; and best of all, the syntax isn't nearly as strict (goodbye excessive amounts of curly braces!). And it is for all these reasons that I absolutely adore Ruby as it has given me a new-found appreciation for these languages after taking courses in Java. I almost didn't believe that we didn't have to declare a variable's data type. And felt like a breath of fresh air learning that all it took for exponentiation were two asterisks without having to look through Java index to call a method. It all makes me wonder what other features Ruby has to offer! While I certainly won't be naive enough to believe I'll truly master Ruby (or any language for that matter), I'll always have fond memories of my very first computer language, Java.
