The saying goes, it’s about the journey not the destination. To take every experience as you stroll down the career path that you have chosen. What they forget to tell you is that this reminiscent feeling of accomplishment occurs after the stress, discomfort, and all that encompasses learning new things.
My journey en route to become a software engineer has been a rocky road on land that strangely sometimes makes me seasick yet I can never find the reason for it. The multiple routes that presented themselves when I chose the Computer Science career path have been somehow curvy, neverending, and recursively leading me back to square one. Each semester that I continue down in Computer Science, find myself having to learn another coding language - this time around being Javascript.
Initially, I thought that with my experience of climbing the mountain that is the Java coding language, and the steep cliffs of the C coding language, that I would be able to scale the Javascript molehill pretty easily. However, it was recently that I realized that not every mountain can be climbed in the same way. Javascript seemed like it would be a breeze to run through, but when running through JSFiddle and some of the example problems, I found myself tripping up over the smallest of details when writing my own Javascript code.
Having to relearn the fundamentals of code through the Javascript syntax, as well as to learn the rules of ES6 as well was the main challenge that I realized. Many of my previous knowledge from Java, C, and C++ started to play tricks on me, and often I would forget which is the correct syntax used for Javascript. Yes Javascript was pretty easy to me, but I would be lying if I said I did not make it at least ten times harder than it needs to be when I create functions.
I do not think that Javascript is a bad language, nor do I think that the syntax of the language is different enough to cause more trouble than other coding languages. Personally I think that because I have a basic understanding of other languages prior, I am subconsciously thinking of how to code through the means of either Java, C, or C++. I’ve come to notice that each coding language has their pros and cons when it comes to the objective, and so when it comes to web development, Javascript works more than the other languages. The fact that I continue to revert back to thinking in Java or C when addressing a coding problem only goes to show that I am not trying to understand the new perspective given to me through Javascript. The second time around of working on the Javascript practices, I cleared my mind of past methodologies that I used in other coding languages and slowly tried to continuously use the ES6 syntax, this time I was finally able to grasp the fundamentals of Javascript without tripping myself over thinking about other ways that I have solved the problem in the past using other languages.
When I take a step back to see the bigger picture, the Computer Science classes that I’ve taken so far have equipped me with several different climbing tools necessary to overcome the coding task at hand, which is currently software engineering and web design. This massive mountain that I created for myself out of a molehill has got me wanting to rethink what I already know, and to have an open mindset for the learning opportunities to come.