<p>If I do not know anything about programming at high school, should I major in Electrical Engineering? Which programming language does EE use: MathLab or C++?
Thanks in advance.</p>
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Should is up to you, but you certainly CAN. Your program will offer you instruction in whichever languages they require. The only downside is that better knowledge generally leads to better decisions - if you DID know some programming, it would help you to decide whether or not EE was the right major for you.</p>
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It varies a bit depending on your program and course selections, but my school required at least a minimal study of both C++ and MATLAB, and some electives then expanded on one or the other. There are other language options out there, so depending on your school they may favor MathCAD or Mathematica over MATLAB, although I think C++ is pretty standard now as a “basic” programming language.</p>
<p>Good luck!</p>
<p>So is programming a must for every EE courses? Actually in the course catalogue of my school, the prerequisite for EE courses does not mention anything about Computer science courses which teach MathLAB and C++…</p>
<p>Most courses will use little or no programming, but I have yet to hear of an EE program that did not teach at least a little. As a warning, I have had many classes require MATLAB without listing it as an explicit prerequisite - many professors do not really consider it programming, and it is easy to pick up at a basic level anyway.</p>
<p>List your school and I (or someone) can give you a better idea what you need, otherwise I have told you all I can.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry so much about the programming requirement. If you can do integrated circuit layout, design an amplifier, and understand how a MOSFET works, you can handle a little matlab!</p>
<p>You might learn HDL (Hardware description language) like Verilog in a digital circuit class. I might be wrong. But that is what I assume. You might do some work with FPGAs. </p>
<p>But don’t trust that I am right.</p>
<p>Every engineering student will have to take one GENERAL PURPOSE programming language. It is either C, C++, Java or Python. MATLAB is mostly taught in EE departments in intro analysis class. Like cosmicfish said, we can’t tell you where MATLAB is used without knowing the name of the school. At my school we first learned MATLAB in a course called “Computer Aided Analysis for Electrical Engineering”. This course is offer to Computer Engineering and EE students (Environmental at our school takes this as elective). The course is designed to take at the second semester of freshman year or first semester of sophomore year. But it is not required until late sophomore year or early junior year, because our programs start off with general ed requirements (science, liberal arts, calculus). So classes like EE Lab I which require some MATLAB usage (for a few labs), is usually not taken until late sophomore year. </p>
<p>The point is, things vary from school to school. MATLAB is not difficult to play with, but can be quite a headache as it is mostly for matrix computation. I sometime regard it as more complex than C++. </p>
<p>===</p>
<p>For most students, regardless whether you are EE or Physics, if you ever need to take Calculus III (multivariate), the chance is you will have a very tiny portion of lab that will ask you to use MATLAB to graph 3D plots. So it is usually the first (and only, for most students) encounter of MATLAB.</p>
<p>==
side-note
It is funny how MATLAB, written in C and Java, inherits the styles of the C’s and the Python’s. Has anyone noticed that?</p>
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Specifically, it inherits the worst traits of C and Python. ;D</p>