I've been programming, one way and another, since I was about eleven years old.<\/p>\n
I taught myself a lot, and learned from my father and from friends, and then in college I took Computer Science classes.<\/p>\n
And some of those classes weren't just about programming per se. I took a Theory of CS class (which felt more like math than like computers), and a Compiler Design class, and so on.<\/p>\n
But I was never actually trained as a software engineer.<\/p>\n
And it's finally beginning to get in the way of my work.<\/p>\n
The first time I noticed this kind of issue was when I took a graphics class the year after I graduated, while I was working for the college. One of the things the class tried to do was create a graphics library, which made me nervous because (at the time) I didn't have a clear idea of what a library<\/a> was, despite having been writing code for ten years.<\/p>\n I eventually figured that out. But I've been noticing more of this kind of thing in the past few years.<\/p>\n Possibly the most important thing that I was never formally taught was the idea of a function as a first-class object<\/a>. When I first encountered callbacks<\/a>, sometime post-college, I couldn't figure them out. Reading Intermediate Perl<\/a><\/cite> a few years ago was my first real exposure to a lot of related concepts, including anonymous functions. I'm still struggling with the idea of closures<\/a>.<\/p>\n There are a bunch of other common and widely used programming concepts and practices that I haven't had much exposure to and haven't used much. For example:<\/p>\n And I've never worked on a significant multi-author software project, which may help explain why and how I've never really learned how to do any of the following:<\/p>\n I'm sure there's lots more I could say along similar lines, but that'll do.<\/p>\n In short, though I've written probably a few thousand lines of code in my time (which I know is not a lot by professional standards), in probably a dozen different programming languages, I don't have the training or the knowledge to engage in really good software engineering practices.<\/p>\n\n
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