Let's start the year programming

It is surprising the reception that the good Mario And to tell the truth, it is the first article that I publish that generates more than 10 thousand views, this puts the fence somewhat high for the following ones and I hope not to disappoint you with this 🙂 Thank you very much for finding my writings interesting enough to share them by the way 🙂

Programming Languages

This is a fashionable topic, everyone wants to program, or at least everyone thinks that it is an increasingly necessary skill, and to tell the truth I would like to write a whole book on programming, GNU / Linux, security, and maybe at some point I can, just learn how to write free books and nice format 😛.

Technology advances rapidly

This is one of the reasons why I have not written the book yet 😛 since I want to do something that can overcome the barrier of time in a field where things do not usually last more than a few days in the current way. That is why in this article I want to tell you a little about the concepts rather than the implementations, in this way we can reread these lines in a while and they will continue to be valid.

The principles last longer

Although there are many programming languages ​​today, many of the concepts can be traced back to the same origins. By this I mean that many of the things that are learned today have been valid for a long time, and probably will continue to be, this because programming is done by people and as long as they continue to develop, some concepts will remain.

Knowing the basics

Many courses already exist, some free and some not, that expose much of the syntax of many of the most popular programming languages ​​today. But we are not going to do this here 🙂 I want to tell you a little about what every programmer should think before starting to program in order to do a decent job.

Entering the mind of the programmer is certainly something necessary, already in a somewhat old article we discussed the theme. Now we are going to go into the concepts that allow us to write the code.

Variables and functions

The variables are memory spaces, let's think about the mailboxes that large buildings have, they are designed to store certain types of objects, there are large and small ones, they can be alone or in groups. A variable is a value that you know will be used over time, although you do not exactly know its value in the beginning, if you know it and you know that it will not vary, we are facing a constant.

Functions, on the other hand, are sets of instructions. An instruction is the most basic thing that a processor can do, the reason for being of the functions is to allow the programmer to group sets of orders to be able to repeat them throughout a program. Let's see a simple and detailed example.

This is a small program written in C, we have the function hand, The variable saludo, and the function printf that comes from the library stdio.h. Let's modify the example a bit and then compile it to see what happens.

We have added a little function called saludar which takes as an argument a variable called saludo and prints it. This does not change the final result of the program much but it allows us to show a great and useful principle of programming, the abstraction. Let's see the result:

A simple program, which is full of knowledge and work.

Libraries

The reason I created the function saludar it was simply to show one of the greatest principles of software development, which we have already named: abstraction. Just as we have defined saludar, printf() has been defined somewhere in our operating system (the GNU standard C library), this place is commonly known as a library / module / library. Libraries are sets of functions that allow us to add functionality to our programs without having to reinvent the wheel. In this case, thanks to printf We don't have to worry about all the logic necessary to be able to display the message we want in a terminal.

Libraries are present in almost all current programming languages, since having sections of code to choose from and implement is easier than creating each function from scratch.

Abstraction

Imagine the mail system, we do not need to know all the necessary logistics to send or receive a letter, the same happens with programming, abstracting is essential to generate durable and elegant code. This process allows you to use names general to define processes general  In other words, if we create the function enviarCarta() we know in a way general that said function will take care of sending a letter, but not necessarily what steps are required to do so. And this is another point why abstraction is so good, since it allows us encapsulate process segments.

Encapsulation

Our role saludar It is a clear example of encapsulation, it allows us to have a closed block with specific instructions that we can use one or a thousand times within a program. This makes the code easier to read and easier to debug since if an error arises, we know exactly what the limits of our function are, and we know each statement in a small space. This brings us to a fairly common programming principle in UNIX

Do one thing, do it very well

A good function is one that only It does one thing, but it does it very well. Let's think about this for a moment ... enviarCarta() it would probably do a lot of things, which can't be good if we want to debug the process, while saludar() only does one. Over time, if problems arise, the second will be easier to repair than the first. An option to avoid this problem would be to generate different levels of abstraction for enviarCarta(), this means that within the function there would be others such as verificarSobre() and maybe inside this one like verificarRemitente(). Ultimately this last function (verificarRemitente()) is much more specific than just enviarCarta() and in this way we can encapsulate parts of the code so that they do what is necessary and only one thing at a time.

Practice

Learning the art of programming requires practice, and since I have now taken a very general look at the subject, it is necessary for you to practice with various languages, or various problems. First trying to generate specific functions, then increasing the complexity. As always, if doubts or suggestions or comments arise, they help me a lot to know which aspects to reinforce. Thank you very much and may 2018 be full of successes and amazing projects. Cheers