Computer Information System question
- Thread starter th3g3nt
- Start date
You'll hear this a lot but, it depends on what you want to do for a career. An understanding of one or many programming languages is not the skill of most interest to employers, it is someone who understands how to program from first principles and the theory behind data structures and algorithms. The actual language syntax anyone can lookup in a book or online, the crucial bit is being able to design the software such that you're using the right parts of any language to implement your system.
Don't get me wrong, practical programming experience is also vital - you cannot possibly understand the aforementioned theory correctly without having written the code, made the mistakes and understood why an alternative approach is better.
In summary, it is symbiotic - if you're interested. enthusiastic and put in the effort to learn then you will be suited to this as a career, if you're not then you probably won't. Fundamentally, you have to enjoy solving programming problems.
the trouble with that statement is that
for every one person that says that they are/know a system analyst who programs in COBOL there will be ten who program in C and 20 who program in VB and 50 who program in Java.
Visual basic has it's place and is still widely used, it's a rapid application development language, lots and lots of businesses are using it...
A few years ago I worked in a software house, where 20 people were turning over something like 1 million a year programming in VB.
The place I work now has a software division mostly programming Java, they turn over less per head, (though the software division is over seas) with something like 40 million but nearly a thousand coders doing that.
(e.g whilst you may consider VB some kind of scummy half bred spawn of MS language, it's ten grand (in GB pounds, more in US dollars) more profitable per developer per year than the arguably more "real" Java language. (that doesn't account for inflation either.)
in answer to the original question...
it depends what you intend to do....
if you intend to make your millions programming applications that run on android then start specialising in Java.
if you want to write fast turn around generic looking "business" software, then get proficient in VB.
if you want to write software for embedded systems then you might find that C is the best choice.
Overall though whilst you're still in college it's not a good idea to specialise, Ideally you should seek knowledge of the fundamentals. and get a broad and rounded view of all the languages that you can see.
the simple reason for this is that you don't know what the next big thing in software is going to be, you also don't know where you'll be working when you finish your education.
Agreed, this is exactly what I was referring to previously.
