“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.”
—John “Not The Decimal System One” Dewey
“The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”
—Alvin Toffler
What are we learning in school? How to be a Flutter developer? How to be a React developer? How to be a Rust developer? How to be a JavaScript developer? How to be a C++ developer? How to be a C developer? How to be a Pascal developer? How to be a LISP developer? How to be a FORTRAN developer? How to be a COBOL developer?
See what I did there? Besides ask a lot of questions?
Yes, you might be wanting to go to school so you can work on web development or embedded systems in the latest and greatest languages. And maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll do some of that in school.
But here’s the problem:
So what can you as a student do? There’s no way you’re covering it all.
This is where the main goal comes into play. Your job as a student is to do one thing:
Learn how to solve any programming problem.
Even if you’ve never seen the problem or technology in your entire life.
That’s the whole goal.
Importantly, it’s not to learn to be an iPhone developer or an Android developer or a Go developer. All that stuff is covered by the main goal. You might not learn Go programming in school, but you’ll learn how to learn Go programming on your own.
Learn how to solve any programming problem.
That’s it. Everything else is window dressing.
Being able to learn things on your own is a required skill when it comes to software development. It’s really unlikely that your first job will solely use technologies you’ve used in school. And, in fact, recently-graduated students might be surprised to find out that none of the technologies they’ve used at school are present in their first gig.
So why on Earth did we just spend four years learning all this crap about operating systems and assembly language and algorithmic analysis and—?
EERRRNT! [buzzer sounds] You didn’t just spend four years doing that. You just spent four years learning to solve any programming problem.
And think about it. How would you teach people to solve any problem? Well, you can’t exhaustively teach them all zillion programming languages9, frameworks, and techniques. So that’s off the table. And whichever ones you do pick might or might not be used for a particular person’s job.
So we have to get more fundamental. We have to practice solving problems so many times that we develop and enhance our problem-solving skills. Because you’re going to be faced with problems in an interview or at work that are completely unfamiliar. You won’t be able to draw on any specific languages or algorithms you’ve learned. The one thing you will be able to use is your problem-solving skill.
Finally, there’s a bit of a corollary here: when you’re learning to do something (even if you’ll never use it at work), don’t cheat. The goal isn’t to learn how to delete the head of a linked list. The goal is to practice solving programming problems! And just looking up the answer deprives you of that practice. Cheat your way through all the assignments at school and you’ll never develop the one fundamental skill of software developers: being able to solve any programming problem.
What is the main goal of a computer science student?
Why is learning languages and frameworks not the main goal?
What do you have to do to accomplish the main goal?
Why is cheating in computer science classes a bad idea in terms of your learning?