How do I not lose my programming skills?

[aimforthehead]

So, I'm familiar with the "use it or lose it" concept, but with programming there are so many languages and so many ways to program that it seems impossible to keep all of that information.

I have taken about a year and a half of programming, finishing all of my lower division courses. I even got A's in every class (except for my first, which I got a B. Starting programming was rather hard for me). Next semester I am going to take an Exam in Programming Efficiency, and looking over all of the subjects covered I feel like I'm going to have trouble with it. Things like hashing, the several searching / sorting algorithms for data structures, writing operators, I remember doing them but it is like right when I finished the courses they were covered in, they just escaped my mind.

I wish I could just jump in and start making random programs which use all of these skills, but I find it to be incredibly tedius. Unless the program is personally interesting (like a game project) or a school assignment, I just can't bring myself to get too motivated.

The good news is if I fail the exam, I stay in a class which is just review over everything I learned and that might not be a bad idea for me. But going through school, I feel like I am going to be underprepared for the workplace. I'm getting straight A's, but I feel like a lot of information simply escapes me after I finish the class. I catch on pretty quickly, but is that enough? I feel like I need to actually hold on to all of this information...

[Bignose]

There are all sorts of programming competitions and contests and the like out there. I like Project Euler, personally. http://projecteuler.net/about

 

You can always volunteer to help on some open source project, too.

[Strange]

The important thing to learn are the principles of programming (structured design, etc.) These are transferable skills. You might not have used a given language before (or have forgotten it) but you should be able to pick it up fairly quickly. Especially if you have some experience with a range of languages with different syntax and styles (procedural, declarative, functional, etc).

[Greg H.]

If you're preparing for an exam, I would just start writing programs that answer the questions likely to be on the exam. It may be tedious, but practice will help you remember.

 

Another idea may be to just write it on paper in pseudo-code. The exact syntax only matters when you know what language you're going to be implementing in; actual syntax is unimportant when you're discussing basic principles such as design patterns and algorithms. Pseudo-code will help you more easily separate knowing how to program well from the business of writing actual code.

Edited August 2, 2013 by Greg H.