I always found coding to be very unique in its own way. The best way I can relate it to is like math. Both of them are there own language, althought there concepts may be difficult to grasp on, they provide an extrodinary amount of information that is crucial to the world we live in today and is constantly evolving. As technologies started to advance, programming and coding has also been on the rise and doesn’t seem to end anytime soon due to its prevalence.
I finally got my first hands on experience with programming in EE 160 my freshman year of college here at University of Hawaii at Manoa. There I learned my first coding language, C, a wonderful language that I had no prior experience too. And all I can say about it was wow, programming is harder than it looks. I really underestimated what it takes to be a programming and that is only a intro class. But as much difficulties I have faced taking the class, it doesn’t mean I did not enjoy the concepts I have learned from the constant mistakes I would keep making. If anything, it helped me be more prepared in college as you got to expect the unexpected. The following school year I took EE 260 and EE 296 shortly after where I got my hands on C++. This was slightly similar to C but still made me struggle a bit. Especially EE 296 and coding for Micromouse made for some long days in the lab looking at what is wrong in my syntax. But this still didn’t make me lose any interest in coding as a whole.
Fast foward to this 2020 spring semester, I am now back to taking a coding class and this time it is a completely different language I have barely heard of, Javascript. Initially I didn’t know what to expect as I wasn’t too familiar about it but a friend of mine has recommended me to take the class seeing my interest in coding and also because this fits my Engineering Breadth class. So I took this recommendation and so far I am liking Javascript. Lots of the syntax is different from C and C++ but it seems a lot more simpler. It still feels wierd not defining variables and definitons as much as I did back in EE 160, 260 and 296. This new enviornment of having workout of the day coding exercises and the numerous amount of practices really helps me understand the material more than I ever did with the previous two coding languages.
In the future, I hope I can expand my knowledge of coding far past Javascript and expand this knowledge back to my field of major. During this winter break I started to look into the program langauge Python as it was something I wanted to learn but couldn’t bring myself to do only until now. But as with all coding languages, it will be a rough ride of errors and incorrect syntax.