"Hello, World!" for Communication

#introduction #aboutme #howilearntprogramming #beginners

This is my first post. I wanted to write about myself and the stuff I do for a long time. After reading the post by @danytulumidis on Communication is Key I decided to finally do this.

A little about me

I'm doing my undergraduate in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from SRMIST, Chennai. In my high school days, programming was not a thing which my friends or the people I knew were involved in. After dabbling on some languages I finally fell in love with Python.

I had taken a Computer Science course to learn C before I knew Python. It was horrible! All I learnt was boilerplate code:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <conio.h>
int main () {

    return 0;
}

My teacher did a very poor job of explaining what these actually meant (maybe I never asked). I couldn't wrap my mind around these repeating lines of code in every piece of C code I write. For a beginner like me back then it meant missing blocks of key information.

I completed the course somehow but never opened the C reference book again. I was over with programming then. Fin.

But things changed. After a few months I tried to learn programming once again but this time from a good resource. The top Google result brought me to Codecademy. After reading some articles on the language I should learn, I decided to start a journey in JavaScript. I took notes and became more aware of programming practices. The most important takeaway for me was to refer the documentation. I always thought one needed to know all the nitty-gritty stuff of the language!

I didn't last long in the course. I don't know why I left the course mid-way and I never used JS after that (till now!). My next encounter with programming was when I entered my 11th grade. Until then the CS course in 11th grade was Introduction to C++. The education system decided to give us a choice to learn either C++ or Python. And Python was chosen.

I wanted to have a head-start so I took up a Python course in Codecadamy. I fell in love with Python from the very first print statement.

print "Hello, World!"

It was so easy to learn Python. The language syntax was very close to spoken English. I didn't need to encounter any technical jargon. When I was a few weeks in, my CS teacher told that we were learning the older version of Python (Python2.7) and that we need to update to the latest Python3.6. A lot of syntax changes had taken place in the updated version. Notably, my favorite print statement was now: