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Programming in Practice

Name: Anonymous 2007-12-22 23:16

Im a freshman in college right now, learning C in Computer Science.

What I was mostly wondering was, how does programming work in practice? How much do you really need to know by the time you graduate from college (I plan on getting my MS, btw), and what should I spend my time learning now in my spare time outside of class?

Name: Anonymous 2007-12-24 14:37

>>12
But, if I'm not really expected to know much by the time I get out of college, what's the point of college? Sure, you might say it's to get a piece of paper, but is that really it?

Yes and no. You'll learn a lot in college, but you won't turn into an expert programmer without going far above and beyond your courses. You'll probably get more out of your courses and your professors if you go in knowing more as well. Colleges tend to sacrifice depth of education for breadth and keeping it within 4 years, but they're still an excellent environment for learning if you work at it. If you're doing an MS, you'll probably learn a whole lot in those final years.

Any suggestions on languages to learn outside of school for future work (thus, not C or Scheme or Haskell etc, but stuff I might actually use rather than just learn from.

If you're lucky you'll get to use a fair amount of C. If you're really lucky you'll get to work in Lisp. Java or .NET are fairly likely, and some bad luck could land you a C++ job. Good knowledge of scripting languages (Python, Perl, shell scripting) will probably stand you in good stead anywhere, and if you're working on something web-based Ruby might be good to know, as well as some of that AJAX stuff.

The bottom line is that there are so many kinds of programming jobs that it's hard to pick one language you should know.

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