When you are ready to pick a career for all its perks and benefits, you have to prepare your mind to face its challenges too. Programming is a technical job and that’s why there are so few of them in the world. People use programs to do things on their jobs, programmers create those programs. They are at the back of everything that your softwares, applications and tools do. But their job is not always that exciting. There are certain challenges that every programmer has to face, and so you have to prepare for them too.
Here is a list of some of them:
Compiler Errors
This can be extremely frustrating for programmers. The programmers who have to face this problem the most are the new ones. You just got done with a long code, you compile it and find out that there are errors. Now, the biggest problem here is that your compiler is not going to be new programmer friendly i.e. it will not display the errors telling you exactly what the problem is and where it is in your code. Your error might be as small as a dot but the compiler’s verbosity makes it look like you have messed up the whole thing. The best solution to this problem is practice. The more you practice the more you get used to the syntax of your programming language. With time you also start understanding what the error is that’s being displayed by your compiler. Not to mention, IDEs like Eclipse for Java (and other languages too) have made the job even easier for programmers as they can see the errors as they are writing the code.
The Sitting
If you have always dreamed of a life where you could just sit and make money, stop wishing for it. Programming is just the job where you have to do everything (of course, coding) while sitting. However, it is at this point that you start hating the whole idea of sitting and earning. There is just much of sitting required in a programming job. You will have to sit in the same chair for hours and hours. If some particular program has intrigued you to the best of your passion, you might end up sitting the whole day. To make it worse, you have to sit while staring at your computer screen. This is not healthy at all and very soon you will start feeling the pains. Your back will start hurting, your eyes will start burning and much more will start happening.
The Debugging
Yes, once you have written your program you have to face the monster of debugging. Debugging is quite frustrating for any programmer. There are those little bugs in your programs that you have to get rid of after you have written the whole thing. The big problem is to find those bugs one by one and kill them. The process of narrowing down your options and reaching the root cause of the problem is not that easy. One way for programmers to know the problem is by running the program and monitoring it to see at what point the error takes place. They can use debuggers to know what the problem is. However, debuggers are programs too and so matters can worsen when you are correcting your problems with a solution that could have its own problems.
Encapsulation and commenting are ways for programmers to make it easy for them to find faults and fix them in their program at later times. However, your first aim should be to write the code so cleanly that you never need to put any comments.
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