Читать книгу Beginning Programming All-in-One For Dummies - Wallace Wang - Страница 30

There’s a big difference between knowing how to program and knowing a specific programming language. This book describes how programming works, which means you’ll understand the principles behind programming no matter what programming language you decide to use.

When you understand a specific programming language, you’ll figure out how to write a program using that language. Don’t confuse knowing how to program with knowing a programming language!

When people learn to speak their native language, they often think their particular spoken language is the only way to talk. So, when they learn a foreign language, they try to speak the foreign language just like they speak their native language, but using different words. That’s why literal translations of foreign languages can sound so funny and awkward to a native speaker.

That’s exactly the same problem with understanding programming. To understand programming, you have to use a specific programming language, but each programming language works a certain way. So, if you know how to write programs in the C programming language, you may mistakenly think that the way the C language works is the way computer programming also works, but that’s not true.

Like human languages, programming languages differ wildly. Someone who knows how to write programs in the C language thinks differently about programming than someone who knows how to write programs in assembly language.

To describe how programming works, this book uses a variety of examples from different programming languages. You don’t have to understand how each program example in this book works. Just understand that programming languages can look and solve identical problems in very different ways.

First, try to understand general programming principles without worrying about the way a particular programming language works. Then try to understand how a particular programming language works. As long as you know how to keep these two topics separate, you can figure out how to program a computer without the distraction of knowing a particular programming language.

Besides, programming languages rise and fall in popularity all the time, so if you know only one programming language, your skills may become obsolete within a few years.

At one time, most programmers used assembly language. For programmers who wanted a simpler language, they used BASIC or Pascal. When BASIC and Pascal fell out of favor, programmers gravitated toward C. Because C was so dangerous to use, many people started using C++ and Java. Microsoft created its own version of C++ called C#. Apple initially adopted a language similar to C++ called Objective-C, but then it created its own language called Swift. After running into legal problems using Java, Google adopted Kotlin as the official language for writing Android apps.

When learning any programming language, the only certainty is that new programming languages will appear all the time, so you should master the popular programming languages and keep learning the newer ones as well.

Remember: Focus on understanding programming, and then worry about understanding a particular programming language. After you understand how programming works, you can adapt to the next popular programming language of tomorrow, whatever that may be.