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Ronald Colyar
Ronald Colyar

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WHY LEARNING LOWER LEVEL LANGUAGES IS ESSENTIAL!

When I started writing software at the age of 14 years old, I picked up the programming language Python. Python was great and easy to understand for the most part, but later down the line, I began to do more intensive computation that python was a bit too slow for!

This led me to move to different languages such as JavaScript, Kotlin, and then C/C++. I began to visualize the lower-level computational concepts like memory and addresses which made me feel like I was connected to the computer! Picking up lower-level ideas really helped visualize data structures and time complexity. For example, you visualize why an array in the worst case would take O(n) complexity for insertion/deletion since you have to manually copy/deallocate the first array and create/allocate the second.

These tasks are expensive and are taken for granted in higher-level programming languages! Learning at least one lower-level language will help your overall understanding of computation and make you a better software engineer!

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