Third SLOG

    During this week, I faced some difficulties when I tried to trace back recursive function. I could trace simple recursive functions but when functions are complicated, I found that I always made mistakes. Not only complicated functions are difficult for me, but also those tricky functions. I often made tiny mistakes when I traced back because I am a careless person so I think I have to do a lot of practice to do well in this section. However, recursion is so useful that I can use two to three lines to do something that I have to write many lines to do so. With recursion, a lot of things are getting easier although I sometimes make mistakes. 

Impression of first few weeks

    For the first few weeks, I found out that the material learned in csc148 was very different from csc108. Although these two courses focused on the same computer language, csc108 was like an elementary course but csc148 was more like a high-school course. The most impressive thing for me was Abstract Data Types. I thought we could only use the built-in methods in Python last semester, but now I know that I can create my own class and do whatever I like. For example, we learned Stacks in class. This method seems useless at first but I found that it’s very useful when I want to just add things on the top or “pop” something out from the top. Before I learned that, I may have to use while loop or for loop to do so. However, with Stacks, I can just write one line to do so. 

Why geeks should write

Why geeks should write?    Wow, in most people's mind, geeks are staying in front of computers day and night. However, why are they spending so much time writing and working on computers?First of all. Obviously, they write programs. However, not only programs are one of the most important things that geeks are writing, but also journals. Nowadays, many good programmers have the habit of writing journals every day for debugging, designing, or just recording. A fabulous program is never done in one time. Programmers have to debug many times before the program is perfect unless they have a Super Brain. If a programmer does not write journal about what they've done so far, he may forget what he is doing at the next day. With a journal, he can quickly remind himself where he has been so far.    Besides journal, geeks should write something to explain what their programs are. Codes are not only written for the programmer to read, but also for others programmers or users. If only the programmers can understand the code, the code is rubbish. Codes are written for every user to use or edit. Therefore, geeks must learn how to make everybody understand their codes in whatever language. I believe a good programmer is often a good writer and speaker. This is also a good factor of making a 'geek' become successful 'geek' !