Opinion
The Most Important Programming Lesson
An anecdote on learning programming followed by tips on debugging
In the fall of 2012, I walked into my graduate advisor’s office and asked her which computer science class she recommended for me to enroll in. I explained that I was a complete novice in programming. She suggested Introduction to C Programming. After attending a few lectures, I discover that the majority of the students I spoke to in this introductory course had some prior experience in programming. Six weeks and 80 hours of work later, I dropped the course.
Enter spring semester of 2013. I enrolled in an easier computer science course, Introduction to Computer Programming via the Web. I breezed through the first quarter of the course, executing HTML and CSS with ease. Then, we started Javascript (JS). That feeling of constant anxiety and stress from my previous computer science course returned in full fashion. It was too late in the semester to drop the course, so I asked a friend for help.
One afternoon he walked me through my JS code and explained how you could add a few pieces of code here and there to test if your functions were working as intended. What he showed me was a very basic form of debugging, the process of identifying and removing errors from computer hardware or…
