I'm glad to hear you are doing better. Hopefully, you will be able to use your passion in a Special Problems or capstone class someday. The foundational knowledge you are learning now is important, but as you go higher up in your learning, you may find out that the ability to creatively apply your foundational skills is more important than merely being able to reiterate the material. I'm just a staff programmer, but I believe creativity and passion are the key components for successful graduate students and the future leaders in the IT industry. I'm confident in your effort and pursuit. Please remember to find ways to keep Computer Science study relevant to you. I understand CS can be unnecessarily theoretical at times but appropriate coordination with your advisor and professors should allow you to find a learning path that both meets university requirements and allows you to flourish.

Most thinks at the University level require a passion. Some people are naturally gifted. I was not one of them. In order to be "successful" in the university experience you kind of have to have the mindset of "what's in this for me"? What I am going to do with this and how can I apply it to achieve the goals the Lord Jesus has set for me. Sadly, I wondered though college without focusing on Christ but I did have goals. I started in Industrial Electronics and Electrical Engineering and had trouble. I did okay for a while but I could see how to apply the topics to anything useful in my life. I felt the Lord possibly drawing me to music and I tried that for a while but I was too lazy and didn't seek the Lord enough. I found music seemed just as hard as Electrical Engineering (take Aural Perception for Example and how fast those kiddos rattle out their major/minor and other scales), but that I wasn't ready to put in the work at that stage of my life. I eventually got my BS in Computer Science because it came easier for me than the other diciplines. Why did CS come easier for me? Because I already liked Math and Music and I already had programming as a hobby. That was enough to get me through some of of the material with less effort. I wanted to create my own code and release it to the public. I had a "passion" for programming and it didn't conflict too much with what the professors were teaching. When you find your "passion" and the "why" the how will come. I haven't completed an Ironman yet, but if you have the time or money you might consider training for an ultra-endurance event some suffer. Take some challenge that seems impossible like an Ironman and go for it with some strong committed Christian friends that will hold you accountable. If I keep doing it and don't quit, you will be surprised at the barriers you overcome. As I said, I have yet to finish an Ironman, but I have overcome some hurdles that I thought very well might stop me in the beginning. The point is, you have to find a passion. Maybe you want to code Video Games and put them on GitHub this Summer. You can get started with SVG, HTML and WebAudio: SVG.js v3.0 | Other Elements Personally, I don't like Java or PhP. I feel both languages have "issues" but they are probably good beginner languages since they don't have a lot of "arbitrary" barr

I prefer Haskell, but I haven't been able to use it much lately.

The longest programming misconception I've ever held is that JavaScript (ECMAScript) is "bad". It took me a long time to see JavaScript as (just another "assembly language") but I've finally made "peace" with JavaScript. I think...

I prefer to use Visual Studio 2019 as my Git UI and Git Bash for whatever I can't do in the main VS IDE. I like to keep it simple.

I can see how that might be frustrating or humiliating. I'm not a big fan of Java personally, but I feel I can code it. The thing that irritates me more than anything else is "Must have X years of experience in XYX" programming language. That's usually not a good indicator of a programmer's ability to adapt. When screening for candidates, companies should search on paradigms (Imperative, OOP and Functional) and possibly experience with APIs and business processes to see if a candidate is a good fit. I'm thinking about applying for a IT job with the IRS, but for their external positions, they often say something like "Must have X number of years of programming experience in Java or COBOL..." I can understand why companies look for programmers with COBOL experience because COBOL is IMO very hard for a CS graduate to tolerate, but Java is a respectable language even if C# and Haskell are better :)

My personal experience has been that classic C# MVC (Without .NET Core) is often the easiest to debug for complex business logic (not necessarily UI logic). I spent most of my years developing ASPX WebForms (or PeopleSoft hack... [1]) and a little time with ASP.NET MVC and some JavaScript and even a small bit of Node.js. I've even snuck F# and Haskell in (for simple tasks) when I could. My experience with Node.js in VS2019 was that the intellisense and debugging wasn't as rich as what you would get if you used old-school C#/MVC. Seems I couldn't drag the instruction pointer around at will like I could in C#/MVC and I maybe couldn't run certain commands in the debugger window when using Node.js instead of C#. Also, when using C#/MVC I felt the intellisense was quite rich but I didn't get that same feeling with Node.js in VS2019. You might have a better experience with Node.js in *other* IDEs besides VS2019. Then there is the whole part of the "stupid errors". I'm unfortunately a very absent minded person so I often make "stupid errors" in JavaScript that I wouldn't make in C# because C# protects the user from some level of "stupidness". That's where Haskell comes in. I know this is off topic, but Haskell has a really rich type system and is highly immutable so is really hard to achieve side effects or stupid errors in pure Haskell. With that said, I've found the debugging/IDE experience in Haskell to be a bit awkward even if I personally do feel Haskell is the best overall language for Line of Business applications. I think Microsoft tried to bring a "Haskellish" language called F# to the masses, but I think they kind of messed it up by making F# impure. I think this decision on Microsoft's part was to reach a broader audience and make it easier for F# to work with .NET but honestly, as much as I respect Don Syme (and other great F# contributors), I feel Microsoft may have been better off just sticking with pure Haskell and highly discouraging mutability. Now, I think the fact of the matter is that Haskell, F# and maybe even C#/Classic MVC "might" require a higher learning curve than Node.js. The callback and promises in Node.js did seem to give me some headaches but I got over them and I found Node.js to be very intuitive. The libraries in Node.js felt pretty mature to me. Things like WebSockets felt quite trivial in Node.js to me but they seemed to be a royal pain to me in C#/MVC. Regarding .NET Core. Personally, for everything new, I would use .NET Core instead of Classic MV

"Just as most programmers today warn people not to use assembler, probably future programmers will warn people not to use anything other than natural language." - Quantum Robin Please don't go down this rabbit hole. I really don't want to see a resurgence of COBOL...