COMPUTATIONAL THINKING

I have been coding for close to five years but actively for around two years. In the three years prior to the recent two years, I was in what they called ‘tutorial hell’. Where I kept learning over and over again the same syntaxes which I still forgot because as you would guess I never practised or created anything with.

From my profile, you will find out that I am a finance person and not a full-time software developer. So sometimes I never really found the correlation between what I had learnt and my actual bill-paying job (smiles). Till I found a really cool guy called ‘PYTHON'(guy, because it is less complicated). It was so homely with its syntax and they were easy to learn even without prior coding background. Also, he allowed himself to blend perfectly with my job, so I took a strong interest in it.

In the space of two months, I was done with the syntax (the language of my buddy). And also web development frontend design tools like HTML, CSS and javascript (3 Musketeers of the web). Combining these with my new best buddy. I started to create instead of just code (now this brings me to our topic after the lengthy digression).

It is true that we have a lot of people who can code but not a lot of people who can develop software and usable tools. So I can comfortably say that the difference between a software developer and a coder is computational thinking.

According to these guys https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_thinking

Computational Thinking (CT) is a set of problem-solving methods that involve expressing problems and their solutions in ways that a computer could also execute.

This is a very huge gap that if bridged can take a coder to the next level as it did me. It could take you from thinking about:

Some random python code:

a = 2
b = 3
c = a + b

print(“The sum of a and b is “ + str(c))

To thinking:

Another random python code:
revenue = 5000
cost_of_sales = 2500
gross_profit = revenue – cost_of _sales

print(“The gross profit is “ + str(gross_profit))

This two pieces of code seem the same but in the real sense, they are not, the first one is just plain learning code while the other is a product of computational thinking.

The second has noted a problem (getting the gross profit) and has identified that when the cost of sales is deducted from the revenue it becomes gross profit and voila it becomes code and this can be used over and over again and another syntax could be added to make it more interactive.

In order for a coder to transcend into the software development world, they have to learn to think computationally. Though not easy but possible. Otherwise, they will be like me in the first three years of my coding journey (tutorial hell).

You can look out for more articles from me on a bi-weekly basis where I will be touching python for finance topics and uncloud some interesting mysteries in connecting software development with your work as a financial analyst.

Thanks to Hitesh Choudhary @hiteshchoudhary for making this photo available freely on Unsplash 🎁 https://unsplash.com/photos/D9Zow2REm8U

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