First Impressions and Assignment 1

    So far in this semester, I have been thoroughly enjoying CSC148. As the next step up from CSC108 and CSC165 (for me), I find the course to be not only reasonable in it's expectations and overall difficulty but quite intellectually stimulating when dealing with concepts such as recursion. More on recursion, I find this idea very fascinating to see in practice and I eagerly await my next lecture on Monday covering merge sort. This being said, it is certainly not an easy concept for me. Although I completed all assigned lab exercises correctly, I still found myself taking a long time on each problem so I think it might be beneficial to practice writing more functions at home in order to strengthen my understanding. Aside from this, most of the course content on classes made a great deal of sense to me, especially with the practice that I got completing Assignment 1.

    More on Assignment 1, I felt that it was pretty straightforward. I think that my use of a chalkboard to organize my thoughts on what each class should do and a basic idea of how it should do it was a very effective strategy in completing this assignment. As a result, the writing of all the code was a very short process for me, aside from some of the tricky design choices. I very much hope that my assignment is what the professors and TA's are looking for.

    In addition, I have a test on Wednesday next week and am quite nervous due to the small number of topics we have covered. I feel relatively confident in every concept aside from reading a paragraph describing a class and hinting at what methods it might need. I find myself over-thinking what the class needs or completing the exercise in a different way than is expected of me. Though I suppose after completing Assignment 1 I do feel slightly more confident with this. Regardless, I think some reviewing this weekend will be necessary. I will post next week with my thoughts having completed the test.

Beginning CSC148 and Why Geeks Must Know How to Write

    I've just started my first semester of Intro to Computer Science (CSC148) at U of T and have been delighted to find that students are instructed to keep a weekly updated course SLOG. I found that the requirement of  keeping a log of last semester in CSC165 was extremely useful in helping me to reflect on my learning regularly, as well as allowing me to revisit and answer forgotten questions I'd had in previous weeks.

    Beginning with the topic of why geeks should know how to write seems rather fitting, as many of my encounters with fellow geeks over text communication have been rather strenuous. It is quite frustrating to me that, at times, the writings of individuals involved in the technology community can be far more cryptic than the complex systems said individuals implement. Although we are, after all, geeks and English is not necessarily a thrilling area of study for us, we should all most definitely know how to interact with non-geeks, at least over text. Not only this, but we should also know how to interact with our fellow geeks. Since (by assumption) we are logical thinkers with desire for as little ambiguity as possible, it makes the most sense to have enough power over the English language, just like any programming language, to eliminate such ambiguity. This is certainly a function "1337" speak simply does not allow for (pun intended).

    Aside from the issues with clarity with others, I also feel it important to know how to write to ourselves. I've lost count of the amount of times I have written several lines of comments to describe a small role in a snippet of my code, all to completely eliminate my own future misunderstanding. Just as Mark Dalrymple posted about in his blog (Adventures in Debugging - Keeping a Log), leaving notes to oneself in order to pick up work precisely where one left off is exceedingly useful and time efficient.

Also, this proof of the halting problem in the form of a Dr. Seuss style poem is nothing short of awesome.
How Dr. Seuss would prove the halting problem