SLOG: On Week 7

This week I tackled the second assignment, which proved more difficult - but hence more rewarding - than the first by a not-insignificant margin. Classes are slowly becoming more natural to me, though I'm still bothered by large portions of seemingly redundant code as a result of inheritance. Alas, I'm able to appreciate the structure much more now that we've added more subclasses to assignment one. The implementation of Tippy was rather straightforward, but minimax was quite challenging and, many logic errors and print statements later, was a very rewarding algorithm to finally implement correctly. 

As for the course material, I find it very straightforward and frankly a tad slow paced for the moment - something I imagine I can credit at least partially to my grade 12 CS teacher. Trees  I find especially interesting because of the various possibilities they provide via recursion. 

On Recursion

Recursion is one of my favourite topics in CS, in the strain of logical problems I enjoy greatly as a math major. The beauty of complex processes summarized into a few lines of code is great. Tracing recursion, while an exercise not as exciting as writing recursive functions, I find useful for understanding the skeleton of the recursive function in question and predicting its operation for complex calls. I frankly found the exercises easy, and hope that we will have more difficult problems to solve with our own recursive functions in the future.

Impressions of CSC148

As a student who didn't take CSC148, I was initially worried how sufficient my high school CS experience would be to be successful in the course. While a little refreshment and adjustment was initially necessary, I've been pleasantly surprised with how reasonable the pace, volume, and difficulty of material in the course has been thus far. Many aspects were completely foreign to me; documentation and strict conventions encompassing the majority of these. However, the availability of sample code and very clear instruction made the acquisition of new topics relatively hassle free. I especially appreciated Prof. Heap's teaching style - the expansion of relatively simple topics to explore their subtleties and particularities beyond basic implementations. 

Overall, I'm finding the course to be quite enjoyable, and am looking forward to where it will head in the future.

Week 3: Why Geeks Should Write

The argument is one that, despite my somewhat limited exposure to the field of computer science, I find surfaces quite frequently - that effective writing and communication skills are essential for success (especially in a professional context). The other trend I've noticed is that CS students undervalue the merit of the argument as often as it's raised. To me, Spolsky's article accurately outlines the current situation in the programming field: that experience and writing skills serve to filter through a large volume of otherwise skilled programmers. In so collaborative and technical a field, a comprehensive, readable product is something employers value greatly; it's not something to be dismissed as a gimmick associated with CS courses.