Learning to Learn

In first year we were taught programming. Those lessons just happened to be in Modular 2. In later years, though, we were only introduced to other languages (most notably C and Java), and were expected to learn the rest ourselves. What I took from this experience was the ability to learn a new programming language myself, and because I had been taught the fundamental principles of programming, instead of any particular programming language, I was able to do that. This became more apparent, though, when I started working on the OCC, as it was developed in Visual Basic; a programming environment that I had never used before. After the few years of programming with Java, it came as quite a shock that Visual Basic did not have inheritance, even though it did have classes. Despite this, I was able to employ my knowledge of programming paradigms to this “new” language, and produce just as well structured code as I could with any other language I was already familiar with.