Sunday, April 27, 2014

About Halfway Through Intro Programming

We are hitting week 5 in the Coursera class I am taking. We just finished the pong game. I was a little disappointed that I did not seem to fix one of the scoring issues I had noted. I really thought I had it fixed, but no. Pong was quite a jump in complexity from the previous mini-projects that are due weekly. I had to scramble a bit more than usual to finish the work.

Python is a fine little language, but I still prefer Ruby for some reason. The Python's usage of the whitespace annoys me. But over all, they are pretty similar scripting languages. Kind of six of one... as far as I am concerned.

I think most of the value for me has been in the UI bits of the class, especially the animation. It isn't something that really comes up when one is trying to, say, find the number of politicians in a data set without an end date to their terms in office, or the number of entities that are typed as people and organizations :) Just generate a list and Bob's your uncle. While I like the expansion of my tool set, it isn't overly interesting enough to me to make me want to do UI or client-side programming. Good to know!

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