How much programming is required for financial engineering?

Is learning the C programming language representative of the learning that is required of software engineering as a whole?

• I'm learning C right now because I want to build a solid foundation for learning more programming languages. However, I do find it somewhat tedious and stressful; I'm the sort of person who likes to build a foundation or framework in my head, and work to refine my grasp/understanding. Should I be concerned that this is a sign that software engineering or programming doesn't fit my personality? Does the learning process get "easier" from C?

• Answer:

  Even though I've spent most of my programming career using C, I wouldn't recommend it as a "first language".  I'd probably go with something more like Python to get started, with C after you've developed some confidence in handling data structures, figuring out how to debug, how I/O and system accesses work, etc - and only if you intend to do something in C's "sweet spot" such as systems, HPC, or embedded-device work. C is low-level enough and therefore unforgiving enough that it can cause you to flail painfully if you are still new to programming.  But if you're going that route, some stuff I'd recommend learning about quite quickly: 1.  Get good at debugging.  By that, I mean Really Good.  For some reason, schools don't teach debugging, and it seems to be something that you're somehow expected to pick up on your own, even though debugging is a complex skill by itself.  Note that debugging isn't just knowing how to handle your favorite debugger - it is doing stuff like writing debugging libraries, writing additional debugger-only functions (many debuggers let you call functions in the debugger itself; this is very powerful for debugging complex data structures that may be hard to examine in the debugger), and figuring out good test and debug scenarios.  (If I was moved to write a book on programming, it would focus on debugging...) 2.  As a corollary to general debugging, learn how to use a memory debugger and tracing tool like Valgrind.  One of C's "unforgiving" aspects is that it does no memory management for you, so you will have to get used to the fact that you have to allocate and free things on your own.  Also, you will walk off the end of arrays and mis-sized data structures and corrupt memory, leading to seemingly random and impossible results, and figuring this out is pretty hard without a memory tracing tool. As for "software engineering", yes, everything you confront in C is stuff you'll run into using other programming languages, but it will be more painful in C if you aren't at least somewhat prepared for it.  Also, you should learn an OO language and a functional language early on as well, as these introduce concepts that you may not encounter much in C.