The End of the Year

It's that time of the year again. The end. Comp Sci this year has been beyond fun. It's been interesting  to think about how all the stuff we've learned fits together. Looking back at my earlier blog posts, it seems like I've enjoyed this from early on, and it's something that I still like it now. You keep discovering new things. I remember when I was awed at variable declarations, and then awed by boolean logic. I remember how I was so happy when I made Pong® work. Now I see entire applications, and I can actually understand them and pick apart their workings. It's amazing to see that progress in retrospect, and I'm kicking myself that I didn't start earlier. I feel like I can't major in this in college because I didn't start early enough, but if I had taken this class freshman or sophomore year, I think that computer science would be my degree of choice in college. It just seems like their is no end to learning code. A new need pops up, and it's creativity that births the code that makes the application to meet the required functionality. In economics, what I plan on doing, it's much the same, but it's always money. Computer science can be anything, and that's what I like.
The AP. Oh, the AP. It was easy, but I dislike how they nit and pick and all that. Collegeboard should be petitioned to let kids take the AP in whatever language they want, because I don't think the issue to test is depth of knowledge in a given language, as reference guides abound to help the programmer out. The issue to test is a kid's creativity. I recently saw a sensationalist video on YouTube entitled "14-Year-Old Prodigy Programmer Dreams in Code." I encourage you not to see it. It's about this kid who's really smart and is already in the Colorado School of Mines, and that's cool. But the crux of it is that he "dreams in code." I don't think that's even a relevant thing, as code is an extension of the real world. If you know a language, be it oral languages (English, French Spanish) or programming languages, dreaming in it is just a medium of expressing the inexplicable stream of consciousness that your brain spits out. If you're walking along in your dream with your special someone, and you're outside at night and you realize the sky is starry, you do the following:
English—tell her, "The sky is full of stars."
Spanish—le dices, "El cielo está lleno de estrellas."
French—tu lui dis, "Le cielest rempli d'étoiles."
Java—Object date=new Evening();
            date.setMood(Moods.ROMANTIC);

There is no difference.
But anyways, yeah Comp Sci was cool. Mr. Stephens is a really good teacher and I'll miss him a lot. As far as advice goes, I'm not the best to ask since I didn't really struggle. We should learn more hardware and cool stuff though.

Stuff, etc.

The difficult part of the year seems to be winding down in comp sci with the completion of the unit on recursion. It seems to me that all the complicated logic and stuff is over, and the real applications should be soon in coming. It was much to my surprise, then, when we started Gridworld. Sorry to be brusque, but what is this crap? Is it really necessary to dedicate a portion of the AP to a case study of basic actor behavior? Granted, I skimmed through the manual for Gridworld and it seems lengthy (a possible indication of more complicated things to come), but at this point, it seems like Gridworld is something that belongs in the second six weeks. After such a buildup of academic furor, it is annoying to have to sit down and do this thoughtless busywork. I would rather, perhaps, make my own interface and actors and learn how to add visuals of that nature or maybe move on to different hardware and real world applications, like coding for Android or learning about Windows. Hopefully we can finish this annoying AP stuff soon and get on to the real fun.

Missing: Time

These last couple of weeks in Comp Sci and in my life in general has been rather hectic. With my attendance of a baseball tournament came my absence in two straight days of CS. Somewhere in that span we learned some stuff, and then something was due and now I have a 50 in the grade book. Furthermore, I took a quiz and I had missed the material in class. I learned it after the fact, but I was still confused and I made a 60 on it. I'm extremely grateful that I won't be missing any more class, because I don't think I could survive being swamped like this much longer. I expect that eventually everything will work out and I'll get out of this hole, but right now it's a lot of work. I thought that being a senior that everything would be easy, but it's not...

What's Stopping You?

I had a very exciting week. I went to San Antonio to play with the All-State Band, and let me tell you, it was one of the most amazing things I've ever done. To have a gigantic band of 160 be perfectly in-tune gives me goosebumps, and we could play with such power as to make other musicians' jaws drop. When I left, however, I went to a retreat in New Braunfels right afterward, and I was in a very bad way. To have to leave such a great thing was hard, and I wished to have stayed there forever playing music. And then I asked myself, Why don't I? What's to stop me from becoming a hermit and playing music all day if that's what makes me happiest? I decided that wasn't the best life ever, but I'd be a masterful musician if I did. And that's how masters are created, I realized. It's the lifelong dedication to one art that produces the awe-inspiring works that we always gush over. It's important right now for me to be in school so that I can get a broad knowledge base and be educated, etc., but after I just want to dedicate myself to what makes me happy. That's what Steve Jobs did, didn't he? Maybe I'll dedicate myself to Java development. And maybe I won't. . . .

Esta Lengua que Hablamos

This past week, our Spanish 6 class has been translating a play into English to display while we act it out. Great arguments have erupted over how to translate it. Some students are content with a bland, literal translation. I, however, am insistent upon imparting the same music that emanates from the Spanish rendition. There is no fun in reading the sentence, "He went to the river and saw a girl fall in." Would you not rather read, "As he passed the river, he saw a woman tumble in"? This particularity applies to Java in that I've realized that there is a kind of pattern to Java language, and I feel like there is a certain flow that I prefer to have, especially with consistent indentation and the like. It annoys me when people use spaces to introduce a separate statement, or when people use spaces in an equation, like "x + y" instead of "x+y." Perhaps it is my OCD kicking in, but I feel like I perform better when I have this coding to help me see the code and figure out what is being executed.

If I were a Game Designer...

I'd be downright miserable. Last week, we wrote Pong, a game that at its face seems easy. But given all the classes and methods that we had to do, it was three days to even write the framework. And when it comes to debugging, forget about it. If one thing is slightly off, the game won't work at all. It took time at home with me poring through a bunch of code to figure out what was wrong. Besides being a headache, the fruit of all that labor was just a crappy little game. I have serious respect for the people that created Skyrim.

My Grandma's Grandma

Last week we learned about inheritance, a subject that makes java infinitely easier for me. When you extend a class, it makes something like a subclass, and that makes it easy to remember all the stuff to put in a class. When a class extends another, it helps me to think of them as related and the subclass as literally an extension of its parent. Using this makes me feel like a real computer programmer, one that does not have to spend hours writing and rewriting accessor and set methods...