Let's Go To Class

This week in Comp Sci was all about classes. What confounded me initially were constructors. I had no idea how you could have something that worked without declaring a class or return type, but I just kind of went with it for a while. The moral of the story was that you have to wait, however, for as we expounded on the idea of classes and objects, it all became clear to me. Constructors are what allow you to actually create the object that is acted upon within the parameters of the object class. It seems obvious now, but things can be really confusing initially

Turtles and Stuff Like That

Turtles are the stars of the show right now in comp sci, and that's not cool. Besides being deathly slow, turtles are pretty ugly. More importantly, it's frustrating. We are given this directory with the turtle object and a set of methods to act upon it and I have no idea how it works. Until now, we've been building everything from the ground up, and being affronted with so much information is something I'm not used to. I hope that in the future, this will get easier to understand, but I realize that I have a long way to go in learning how to program in Java, and that's just even more encouragement.

IT'S LIKE INCEPTION

This past week was spent learning about methods. With this "method" (excuse the pun), I'm getting to understand the way that Java is an object-based language. Being able to create objects and call them in other programs is a very useful way to organize code because it's like making a bunch of folders to put stuff into. At first though, I found it very complicated. When we got our first programming assignment on methods, I almost made myself scream with frustration trying to figure out how to write a method to put into a different method that I would call in my main. I stared at the screen for a while and then asked Mr. Stephens for help. It turned out that I was making things too complicated. Sometimes things are simpler than they seem...

Learning Languages?

We've started our foray into the Java language in our Computer Sciences class this week, and I can't help but see it as a parallel to any other language class I've taken. You take clauses, the structure of which varies language by language. In Spanish, subject pronouns are not necessary if the meaning of the verb is clear enough; in French, you always need to put a subject pronoun before a verb; in Java, you always have to give your variable or scanner a name before playing with it. It's amazing how quickly that you can start to express yourself in complex ways. Given just the small amount of code we've learned, I can already write a program that gives you an acceptable age of woman to date back in the folk country. As we build our vocabulary and programming techniques, it's akin to adding vocabulary and verb tenses in a foreign language; as time goes on, your depth of expression increases until you can express yourself just as well in that language as your mother tongue. It's an exciting feeling to be able to reach out and touch that chord of emotion (well, since emotion doesn't exist in computers, that degree of functionality that you can dictate in English) in multiple ways.