Captain’s Slog: Stardate -308918.24752

This week in lecture, I traced code that instructed a turtle to draw patterns recursively. This was really cool! It was nice seeing a piece of code create something visual and pretty. The Turtle example took something I had only read about (recursion) and brought it to life in a more interesting and concrete way. I can say that I really enjoyed this week’s lectures and I was inspired when I saw computer science applied to a sort of digitized, moving art form. In the lab I had practice with inheritance as well as multiple inheritance and using super(). This was good practice. Our biggest challenge was one we finally solved in the end - how to write code to test an example that expects an error(using unittest). After trail and many errors, we came across the right format of code to do this and it worked!

Starting OOP

    Topics discussed this week were interesting and I especially liked the creative and witty writing style in the reading. The ‘Dark Forest’ metaphor makes the point: Inheritance is evil! This makes you want to find out why and what is this inheritance that I should avoid at all costs. As for the more general topic of object oriented programming, I have become quite interested in learning how to apply it to other topics that I want to explore as I feel that object oriented design can better model the real world. I am interested in cognitive science which, among other things focuses on the process of human behaviour and cognition, and object oriented programming can model the interaction between humans and the natural world. One of the challenges I tend to have in object oriented programming is in writing code; I tend to rush to visualize the problem all at once. To solve this problem, (that is mainly brought on by laziness) I structure the code on paper and the mangled pieces start to fall into place.