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Do you have formal training in programming


Have you trained/studied programming or are you self-taught?  

13 members have voted

  1. 1. Have you trained/studied programming or are you self-taught?

    • Studied programming at college/university as part of a degree.
      7
    • Attended training courses as part of my job.
      0
    • Attended training courses in my own time/at my own expense.
      0
    • I'm self-taught.
      5
    • I'm still learning/not started yet.
      1
    • Other (see my post, below).
      0


Question

I've found certain recent threads in the programming forum to be quite interesting, specifically the one about variable naming conventions and the one about how you style your "if" statements. It's fairly apparent that there are a number of different schools of thought on this - multiple ways of coding "if" statements, those who use/don't use Hungarian notation and so on. Each of us probably thinks their own programming habits are the best or whatever. It's been fairly enlightening reading all the different opinions out there and I thought I'd start a poll to try and gauge where the community learned its skills and how the community rates its own skills.

Personally, I started programming when I was around seven years old, in 1983 or so. Nothing sophisticated - just typing in programs (in BASIC) from magazine listings and watching my dad programming on an eight bit home computer. Since then I've experimented with ARM assembly language (a very nice set of instructions), tried 6502 assembly (nice and simple), done some Logo, masses of C, a little C++, some VB/VBA (by far the ugliest language I've ever used) and now program mainly in C#, which I like immensely. Tried some Python recently as well - Python is pretty good.

However, in doing all of this, I've had absolutely no formal training in programming at all. I've never attended a programming course and never been taught by a professor/teacher how to program. I am entirely self-taught. In some ways I think this is pretty good, as I've worked with people who've learned programming on courses before and they've been amazingly bad at programming.

I think my practical programming skills are pretty good, my theoretical ones less so, as I've just not had the education. I've formed my own habits and theories and have stuck with them to this date, refining them as I go. However, I have no idea whether my coding practices are actually sound or not.

So, the poll. Please indicate your background and how you acquired your skills. It might also be interesting if you were to post how you rate yourself (try and be objective!).

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I started as self-taught, but I have an electronics background, so leaping from digital logic to software wasn't too big a step. It is night and day between the two disciplines in that there are standard ways of doing things in electronics, and usually tons of planning, whereas software is much more of an art.

I've been programming for around 8 years now, as a profession. I'm also attending school to fill in the blanks. I really enjoy CS.

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some VB/VBA (by far the ugliest language I've ever used)

I so agree with that - also makes code harder to maintain
never been taught by a professor/teacher how to program

Doesn't matter, (well for me anyway) the degree I did in Computer Science didnt really, really "Teach" me how to program in the real word anyway. so dont go thinking people who have degree's are better than you.

I found my degree course and other courses at other uni's to be very "core" based in that it taught you the basics in a range of different languages and made you re-invent the wheel a lot, but it wasnt until I got into the field that I really discovered how to properly program and specialise in a particular language.

people who've learned programming on courses before and they've been amazingly bad at programming.

computer science degrees or similar are not about programming, its about the science of how computer languages work, system design paradigms, system analysis, database design analysis, etc.

Note: I did learn a lot in my degree course and use 60-70% of it in work.

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