#2 The first part…
… is the worst part.
Today, I want to share a bit about my first coding experience.
There are people who seem to be born with Java as their native language—teenagers writing Minecraft mods or students wrestling with languages like C# in their final exams. I don’t count myself among these fortunate tormented souls. My first time coding? That was during my computer science studies.
I still remember how excited I was, thrilled at the prospect of finally programming something meaningful at the ripe young age of 23. But then reality hit: my first programming language was Scala. A language that ranks somewhere around page 12 of popular languages on Stack Overflow, probably useful in banks and still under development. For a programming newbie expected to learn coding with it—and functionally at that—it was an absolute nightmare.
At this point, I’d love to say that I learned to love Scala, that the benefits of functional programming became clear over the trimester, and that I now enjoy working with it. But life isn’t a fairy tale. Our professor traumatized us students, and I avoid Scala as much as possible. No one said it was supposed to be fun, but I never thought it would be so hard to get comfortable with a language or the logic of functional programming.
What did I take away from this gloomy Scala period?
Especially during your studies, it helps to program something entirely different that you actually enjoy - not the Fibonacci sequence. I think I just need time to heal so that nothing stands between Scala and me anymore.
In the spirit of the season, here’s another little joke:
Why is Halloween like Christmas for programmers? Because Oct 31 = Dec 25!
