Big Boots for Big Concepts

Anubhav Pradhan, the leader of the HSBC Technology Academy, often gets asked which coding language someone should learn next. Which language is most interesting? Most in demand? Most likely to lead to interesting projects and opportunities?

It’s fun to learn new languages, and it’s great that our teams are curious and eager to engage with them. But I think that the most rewarding learning experiences come when we learn not just the details of a new language, but acquire a new way of thinking.

Let me take my own coding ‘career’ as an example (and I put ‘career’ in quotes, because, while I write code today in my spare time, nobody has paid me to write code since about 1998, so my efforts for the last decades are strictly in the amateur category.) I enjoy learning new languages, but there are five in which I have written most lines of code:

• BASIC: my first ever coding language, on an Acorn Atom, back in the micro-computing era.
• COBOL: my first ever professional coding job, on ICL mainframes for the UK public sector.
• Visual Basic: my first foray into writing client side code.
• Perl: when I first started building web based systems.
• Python: the language i spend most time on today, building web applications using the Django framework.

I enjoyed learning all of these languages, but found that, despite their wide variation in age, at base level their logic was remarkably similar. If all I did was swapped one language for another, then I would just have learned syntax and vocabulary.

Fortunately for me, each of these shifts in language was accompanied by the need to understand a major shift in style of computing. The BASIC I wrote on my Acorn Atom was all intended to run in memory on a single user machine. When I learnt COBOL, I also had to learn how to write programs that would interact with other programs (mostly via files in those days), and to work as part of a team. When I learnt Visual Basic, I had to learn how to construct and manage an interactive user interface that was more than just characters on a green screen. When I learnt Perl, I had to learn how to build web applications and deliver HTML and Javascript that would be rendered and run on another device. And when I learnt Python and Django (and all the other languages, frameworks and tools required for a modern web application) I had to fully internalise object orientation, shifting it from a concept I understood, to a way of thinking that came naturally (I know that means that I embraced objects late in my coding life, but I have to point out in mitigation that object orientation wasn't widely used in enterprise computing until years after I got started).

Each of these shifts taught me not just new languages, but new concepts and new way of thinking about computing.

In the HSBC Technology Academy, we have tried to help people make these big changes by creating Boot Camps: these are extended programmes which offer a combination of online training and classroom training (virtual classrooms for now) taught by our internal experts.

Our first batch of Boot Camps launch this week and cover object oriented programming, reactive programming and data science. These might seem like skills which you would imagine already be prevalent across our organisation - and they are. However, there are plenty of people who have been working on legacy, non-object oriented systems for many years (like I did), and who would like to learn how to think with objects. There are plenty of people who want to learn how to go beyond requests and responses and build experiences that react to data in real time. And there are plenty of people who want to learn the ideas and the maths as well as the libraries and frameworks behind data science.

Like all of our new learning initiatives, this launch is an experiment, and we won’t get everything right first time. But we hope that our learners will gain new concepts which enable them to think differently about computing and about the world.