It’s just another set of API

I always remember what my undergrad final year project supervisor said: “it’s just another set of API”. Every time I start to learn a new language, or new platform, his words jump out of my head, and I understand it better every time.

There’re always new technologies, platforms, languages, terminologies in IT industry. People not in this field use it as an execuse not to get into it; people in the IT industry complains about it. Well, not all of them, but also not few.

It’s really not a big deal. Every new language, new platform, or new technologies still follow the same essential stuff. The new syntax, the new library, or new development tools, they’re just new ways to express your ideas into applications.

Take programming language as an example. There’re different programming language paradigm, structural/procedural/imperative programming languages(C/C++, Pascal), Object-Oriented Programming languages (Smalltalk, Objective-C, Object-Pascal, Java, C#), Functional Programming Languages (Scheme, Lisp, F#), Logic Programming Languages (Prolog).

Some of the programming languages may belong to multiple programming paradigm, like C++. It can be counted as imperative language, or OOP language. But the point here is that each programming language paradigm represents a way of express your thoughts in mind.

Imperative language requires you to think from the computer’s angle a lot. OOP simplies thinking by creating objects. Programming languages like Java promotes the idea “everything is an object”. Functional programming language treats computation as evaluation of mathematical function. Logic programming is characterized by programming with relations and inference.

If you have ever learned C and Java hard (one from the imperative paradigm, and the other belongs to OOP), you’ll feel easy to pick up C++, Objective-Pascal, C#. That pretty much covers lots of languages the world is using to build the applications now.

If you learn one language from each of the programming paradigm, get famaliar with the way each paradigm is trying to make you think, you won’t fear to learn most of the new languages.

At the end of it, it’s human thinking that makes computer work. The way (the languages, technologies, platforms) to talk to them is definitely important, but not as important as human thinking itself!

References:

Logic Programming: http://www.emu.edu.tr/aelci/Courses/d-318/D-318-Files/plbook/logic.htm