RECENT CHALLENGING LEARNING EXPERIENCE

Indeed, learning is a continuous process, and its importance cannot be overemphasized. Yes, it is an all important phase that lasts all through our days on earth. It enriches us with solutions to problems and makes robust our knowledge base as we face challenges. Recently, I was faced with a very demanding task of acquiring skills in JavaScript Object Oriented Programming — a domain I am less familiar with, as I have always been a desktop programmer whose language of choice has been Java. Honestly, I cannot exhaustively do the listing of the too many limiting and mitigating factors — ranging from poor electricity supply, access to learning facilities and recourses and, of course, the confusing variations in both language’s syntaxes testing my resolve.

Java and JavaScript, though, they appear related, but both are entirely different and for different usage and purposes. In fact, while all Object Oriented Programming concepts can be implemented in Java, the same cannot be said about JavaScript. The latter is a dynamically typed programming language, and as such, and as an example, the concept of generalizing related object’s properties into an interface cannot be implemented as easy as in the former. This was quite a challenge at first. The chains of errors I got after attempting to define and implement an interface as I used to in Java almost got my eyes popped out. It was like a living hell each time I reviewed my codes over and over again with a mental representation of how I used to achieve the same thing in Java vividly playing like a video clip yet I could not find a trace of where my mistakes lies. All, to my ignorance, appears correct and valid, but I was dead wrong as I would later find out. Like always, once again, the Internet, as known to be a hub of knowledge, became a lifeline, but there arose another problem — access to the web.

It all played out in the middle of the night. I had woken up to a surprised and unexpected electricity supply that night. And typical of a Nigerian, hurriedly I jumped on my feet to take advantage of its availability to put to practice what I have been conceptualizing for quite some days. However, my poor access to the Internet at that time of my need further compounded issues. My frustration level grew to the ceiling, and I almost dumped the task I was working on where it not for my determination and strong passion to achieve excellence and the personal conviction that success and greatness are rewards for handwork. Of course, I have faced similar challenges, if not worse, in the early days of my learning Java, so I should and will definitely come out of this with a solution to why all this frustration the endless chains of errors currently brings, this I quietly told myself before retiring to my bed, as it all happened during the darkest hours of the night. Oh! little did I know that my predicament started by the happenstance of my attempting to use an unknown keyword ‘interface’ in a language that was not designed for it.

It was challenging, notwithstanding, but it was a gateway and an eye opener that led to a whole new world of learning how to do things right; and also, a teacher of a lesson that it comes with a huge cost when assumptions are made in a places where reality demands us to be grounded and well informed.

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