I was talking with a colleague of mine, and we talked about how there are lots of programmers out there that claim that they only can work with one programming language. In my opinion, this is not a good attitude to have, and it certainly will not help you when you are in the job search. There are at least 256 programming languages out there. Knowing only one will hurt you in the job search. As computer programmers, we must be multilingual.
Throughout my studies, I did realize that a lot of the programming languages that I have studied, there are a lot of similarities between them. They main difference between programming languages is the syntax.
‘’’ puts “Hello World” Console.log(“Hello World”) Print(“Hello World”) Console.WriteLine(“Hello World”) ‘’’
Above is how you print out “Hello World” in Ruby, JavaScript, Python, and C# respectively. Although they are all written differently, they are all doing the same thing. I believe that in order to become a very diversive programmer, you need to focus on the basic concepts of Programming. Syntax is something that is easily learned, and google is always there to help if you forget, and your error messages will also help remind you how your code is supposed to look.
Learning how to code is not so much about learning how to type onto a computer. It is all about taking big problems, and breaking them into smaller problems, and logically thinking yourself through to solve the problem. This is why pseudocode is so important. After thinking through the problem you are trying to solve, you can easily translate it into any programming language. Of course, you can use different programming languages to solve different problems, and some languages are better than others to solve certain problems, but the logic is the same throughout.
Being someone who can speak English, Portuguese, and Spanish, I have been able to relate the multiple languages we use to communicate to learning different languages because we all say the same things, just with a different “Syntax.” Once you find a pattern between the languages, you are able to communicate more effectively between languages.
For those who think they are only monolingual when it comes to programming languages, just remember the concepts you have learned in other languages, and don’t be afraid of learning a new syntax, because once you do, you will be more marketable in the job market, and you will be able to consider yourself multilingual!