Engineering has truly changed its face in many areas. One of which is in communication. Engineers are not just spending their whole day doing projects like what many people still perceive. They are also required to communicate effectively in order to present their working. This is one of the reasons why many engineering courses demand the future engineers to possess sufficient language skill. The courses in NUS are no exception.
My programming lesson (CS1101C), for example, requires the students to give title, purpose of the program, as well as the comments in different parts of the programs we develop. It is actually very helpful to do these things to improve the readability of the programs. So, programs are not only containing codes, symbols, or variables, but also words to describe the programs.
Of course the words we put in programs are not in the form of essay, nor paragraph. Usually, only about one or two sentences are needed. However, it is still not an easy thing. The problem is not about accuracy, but efficiency. Our main purpose are not just making the program work correctly, but also make it looks more compact without leaving the core idea behind.
It is important to know technical term in order to help us make the comments look simpler. For example, rather than saying, “add the value of x by 1”, it is nicer to say, “increment x by 1”. The way to overcome this problem is clearly by learning more terms. As the complexity of programs increases, more terms will be needed to describe different types of programs. Since most of the programs are aimed for engineering problem solving, so it is the right opportunity to improve my language skills in terms of engineering problems as well.
Wednesday, October 15, 2008
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