At Flatiron School, we know how difficult learning to code might appear at first – especially to beginners. We hear the same common questions from students of all backgrounds curious about launching careers as developers:
- How do I start coding – and where?
- What’s the best programming language to learn first?
- How do I know programming is even for me?
To help you navigate the endless online resources, opinions, and potential starting points, we invite you to take our newest quiz: “What’s Your Path Into Programming?” below. You’ll find out which language might be a good fit for you and get matched with one of Flatiron School’s free intro courses so you can start coding!
Curious about the reasons behind your results? Read on for how Flatiron School thinks about choosing a first language – and why learning two is actually better than learning one.
At Flatiron School, both our NYC Software Engineering Immersive and Online Web Developer Program take a different approach from the rest of the bootcamp industry: We teach an equal amount of JavaScript and Ruby. Beyond giving you a wider exposure to different languages to help you discover what you’re passionate about, there are a few key reasons this pair of languages drives our curriculum.
Versatile developers = better developers
As our co-founder and Dean Avi Flombaum explains: “If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” If the only programming language you know is JavaScript, every single problem you encounter will look like it needs a JavaScript solution. “That can’t possibly be the case,” according to Avi. “I like to think of our students as swiss-army knife developers – they know there’s never just one tool for the job.”
On Flatiron School’s engineering team, our JavaScript developers have a Ruby foundation, so they’re more likely to bring over the best parts of Ruby and apply them to JavaScript. Consider iterating over an array in JavaScript versus in Ruby:
The Ruby version is easier to read and, consequently, easier to understand. And readability matters – not just because it looks nicer. As Douglas Crockford writes in JavaScript: The Good Parts:
“Computer programs are sometimes thought of as a write-only medium, so it matters little how it is written as long as it works. But it turns out that the likelihood a program will work is significantly enhanced by our ability to read it, which also increases the likelihood that it actually works as intended. It is also the nature of software to be extensively modified over its productive life. If we can read and understand it, then we can hope to modify and improve it.”
Flatiron School students learn how to write beautiful, clear, structured code in a pure object-oriented language and then apply those same concepts to functional programming in JavaScript, building a knowledge base of the best from both languages. It’s an especially appropriate pairing given the direction of modern JavaScript towards a more class-based system, folding in more Ruby-like syntax with each new version (see: the ES6 example above).
It’s that ability to find the most elegant solution or tool for the job that keeps employers coming back to us to build their teams. They don’t see our alums as strict Rubyists or JavaScript developers, but as creative, language-agnostic problem solvers.
Learning how to learn = the only skill that never goes obsolete
As Avi says, “The most consistent thing in technology is that everything is going to change. You don’t see Fortran or ColdFusion developers anymore. Similarly, you won’t be a Ruby developer in 10 years. Eventually, you will need to know more than one language if you want to have an awesome career and build deep, meaningful things.”
Having a laser-like focus on just one language may help you get your first job in that language, but is shortsighted when it comes to building your career. Working as a software engineer, you will need to learn new languages (maybe even as early as your first day on the job). We teach a second language at the beginning of your coding education not just to teach you that language – but to teach you how to learn languages, how to recognize patterns, abstractions, and commonalities between technologies and take on new languages faster in the future.
For example, if you only know JavaScript – which uses prototypal inheritance and doesn’t include much in the way of a classic, class-based OO principles – picking up a class-based language like Java or .NET for your next job will have a much steeper learning curve than if you also had Ruby, which focuses on pure, class-based OO programming, in your toolkit.
Consistently, when we ask our alumni what was the most important skill they learned here, it’s never a specific tool or technology – it’s that they’ve learned how to learn.
Want to learn more? Read what alumni have to say about the Flatiron School on SwitchUp.
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