Week 4: My Impression of the First Few Weeks

           Last semester, CSC108 closed with learning about what classes are and how and when to use them. This course started right where the previous course left off, except now it is more about using classes to represent abstract data types, or (ADTs). Python is known to provide many data types for objects by default (such as integers, strings, Boolean values, etc.) but there are not always data types that satisfy our needs when creating programs. For example, if we wanted an object to represent a student, we would want to store his name, student number, list of courses he is taking, etc. We would have to customize this using the pre-existing default data types and orient them in a way that is easy to extract and manipulate and use later. This is the way I understand object-oriented programming to be. The instructor made the content concise and clear so I definitely appreciate that. Since Python’s syntax is not overly complicated, this takes out one more variable for me to divert more effort into understanding the content better. You can always do better. My one gripe is that the examples shown in lecture were maybe too simple compared to the things we are asked to do for the first assignment. My group (with Jovan and Lukas) kind of struggled at first with understanding exactly what the assignment asked for and how to organize our classes to meet the specifications. However, as we learned more and more about class declarations and inheritance of classes, we knew to make subclasses and declaring exceptions on certain methods in superclasses to make ourselves a nice project. At least that is the hope. In terms of lectures, as long as I keep doing what I am doing (paying attention in lectures, reviewing notes after lecture, doing the assigned readings, etc.), I don’t foresee any problems happening in terms of understanding lectures. Although this course definitely takes things up a notch in difficulty compared to CSC148, I enjoy this material because lecture and lab examples include solving real-world problems and we are now learning how to be good designers and programmers, which is what I came here for.

           I read some of the slog entries from other students concerning last week’s topic, which was asking why geeks should write. I was especially intrigued by Ellery’s slog entry (http://zhexinlai.blogspot.ca/). She thinks geeks should write because they communicate a lot with non-human objects and therefore have expertise in handling them. Since non-human objects cannot verbally communicate and regular people sometimes have trouble dealing with them, geeks would be doing everyone a service by bridging their gap by writing. I think Ellery’s idea is awesome. I only thought about this topic from the geek’s point of view, not how they could help society like she did. Other slogs had equally intriguing ideas, some in line with mine, some totally different.