Why are fundamentals important in programming?

Today I was having an interesting conversation with my team members regarding the new technologies and terminologies that are emerging out in the market and in the business. Many companies take new steps and strategies to market their product with new branding. The branding part not only happens in the level of marketing but also in terms of technologies. From the discussion we had, we realized that the fundamentals are not changing, but every new technology becomes a wrapper around the existing things.

Data analytics can be taken as one such example. Today when there are meetings happening when people talk about data analytics, the projection is made in such a way that there was no analytics in the past and only today the world is moving towards data analytics. I and my DBA friend disagreed with this thing. We all know that data has been there from day 1 when programming started. We were all doing the data manipulations and reporting even before ten years. When we need data in a particular format, we were able to fetch out that data from the respective system.

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Today the modern terminology has changed and they call it Data Analytics and there are even courses that are specific to this and people give more importance to the data. I completely understand the importance of data and how the world is growing now in terms of data. We are all dependent so much on this data. We will not be able to live without referencing or associating ourselves with this huge data around us. Sometimes this can even get scary because, with just one piece of information, anyone can know completely about us with the help of modern technology.

Importance of fundamentals

Here is where I wanted to talk about the importance of fundamentals. In the field of programming, the technology keeps changing and it goes in the trend for a few years and something else emerges after a few years and it keeps going on and on. But my friend who was a C++ developer ten years ago is still a C++ developer. But before 10 years he started writing code using C++ for simple applications that their company was using. Today he is writing the same C++ code for a modern data analytics application to introduce some automation.

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If we look at this example his fundamental skill set is not changing even though the technology in which he is working has changed so much in the past 10 years. I would like to share this as advice for the newcomers where they have huge room for learning but at the same time, the type of learning is very important. The learning should be in such a way that even when there is a change in technology and how things are being used, our skills shouldn't go outdated. I personally feel that in most of the companies the reason for layoffs to happen is also because of this very reason, the employees fail to update their skill set. They are not fast enough to compete with the speed in which the world is moving in terms of technology and the future. Giving more focus to fundamental skills can help us adapt to any technology in the future.