Programming Literacy

Literacy defined in the dictionary could mean one of two things the ability to read and write or having knowledge that relates to a specific subject.  I would like to write about the second definition and that is the knowledge pertaining to programming.  I worked as a computer programmer for five years and learned many different languages that exist only in programming.  I learned from the basic known as visual basic or VB up to visual C# or just C# there are many more languages, but I will only use those two for now.  I mainly worked with and programmed for C# programs.  At first when you look at a block of code all you see if weird words with dots and semi-colons or an underscore at the end of the lines and you wonder what those words and symbols mean.  To learn programming you have to have a curious mind and the willingness to accept failure because you’ll fail many times before you succeed, but you’ll learn a lot when you fail.  The whole process of learning in programming is from failed experiments while trying to do something new.  When you start a new programming project it never starts with coding anything.  First you need to have a defined paper of what this project is for and what purpose it has.  Second you need to start a logic flow where different variables, methods, functions, and classes do what and where they interconnect with each other.  Then starts the fun of coding when you have both the defined purpose and logic flow the coding is a little bit easier.  After comes the most frustrating part of coding the quality assurance testing making sure your code works as it should.  After that is done you will have a finished program.  This is just a brief overview of programming.