Wherefore art thou JavaScript?

01 Sep 2021

What’s in a language? Ever since I was younger, I was interested in learning all six of the UN languages (for the curious they are Arabic, English, French, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish). The older I got the more this same interest morphed from spoken languages to programming languages. Initially I started out using HTML and CSS to code and edit themes on Tumblr and Wordpress, and then in 2019 my dear mentor friend took me to the RISE tech conference in Hong Kong. Being surrounded by so many intelligent and motivated people introduced me to a field that I was always too scared to dip my toes in. I dove headfirst in.

A language by any other name would work as well?

During my time over the last year and a half at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and Kapi’olani Community College, I have been exposed to Java, R, C and C++. Through my summer 2021 internship at Ames Research Center at NASA I taught myself Python and the Linux Environment. Currently, for ICS 314 we have been learning JavaScript and so far, I have been having an excellent time. Of course, learning so many different languages in quick succession has been an experience as sometimes it was confusing as to which syntax was part of which language. Despite these difficulties, I have quickly become engaged by JavaScript. Compared to Java and C++, the two first programming languages I have learnt, JavaScript is weakly typed which has its positives and negatives. On the one hand, JavaScript is fairly smart and has a lot of flexibility, my favorite part being that a function is not restricted to returning one type of object. On the other hand, I feel like more experience with JavaScript will make me struggle with strongly typed languages and remembering the specific syntaxes required. From a software engineering perspective, having this flexibility is crucial in working front-end; one particular benefit is the ability to use single quotations or back quote for strings as URLs often have double quotations.

These athletic delights have athletic ends

Recently I have been grinding LeetCode as I am looking for summer 2022 internships in either data science or quantitative finance so doing this preparation for technical interviews has prepared me for the WODs. I find the practice WODs to be quite fun and almost like brain teasers, which is wholly unsurprising as sudoku is my favorite game. The pace of the class though is indeed fast, and truly lives up to the name of being “athletic software engineering” which is still slightly intimidating. I am sure though that having consecutive deadlines and a relatively large workload will only ensure my success in the future; after this ICS class I guarantee that I will not only be more confident in my software engineering skills but also in time management and organization. This is perfect as I am currently most interested in working in the field of finance which is notorious for having over 60-hour work weeks. So far there has been no massive trouble, but we are only one and a half weeks into this semester so only future will tell.

Romeo & Juliet image source; JavaScript logo source; Mac laptop image source