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What did you do this week?
As part of a weekly series, these topics are a place for users to casually discuss the things they did — or didn't do — during their week. Did you accomplish any goals? Suffer a failure? Do nothing at all? Tell us about it!
There's a thread here about how's everyone dealing with the US-Canada heatwave, well here where I live in Brazil, it's been the opposite, albeit not as extreme. São Paulo has had low temperatures at around 5°(C) in the mornings and most of the days have not gotten temoeratures over 15 or so degrees for more than a few hours. Fortunately, my mom bought a new blouse a week or so before this and I have basically worn it for the whole week.
As for classes, I've been tackling the more demanding classes this week, including the programming class, which involved the first few bits of code I've ever written, which are some simple exercises. The language they're teaching us is Java (or javascript. I don't remember.) I asked some people in the discord why given what I've heard of Java mostly concerns it being bad and someone answered that Java is used in a lot of fields and has less different ways of writing code that does the same things.
Some things I've noticed:
It's "Println" (as in, print [a] line), not "PrintIn" (as in, print [something] in the screen.) After realizing this I changed the font in the mobile Java emulator (I think?) that I'm using to be one that differentiates lowercase l and uppercase I.
Generally speaking, you should probably put in + signs in both sides of your variables if you're going to print a text the examples I got only showed the +-es in the front of the signs. I don't remember if I found this out on my own, via someone telling me in the discord or via one of the answering sessions my new school has for students with questions.
NextLine as opposed to nextString and NextChar allows you to put spaces on whatever you write when the system prompts you too.
Classes have naming limitations imposed in them, probably similar to variables. (I forgot to ask for specifics, oh well.) Point is, classes can't have spaces. Oh well. It just makes programming text more distinctive. Both of those I got from these 'sessions'.
As for the other subjects, things have honestly been rather slow. I think people have gotten teachers to delay the due dates a few days (this time it's into the vacation than next month's stuff) because most people are doing similarly. This is generally because the subjects that involve you coming up with a brand-new text tend to be far harder cognitively and less motivating IMO.
Given the choice, I would teach Python to new students as I think it's more intuitive, but Java is not a bad choice.
I personally dislike Java a lot, but remember languages are tools, and many of them are very similar. One comparison I would make is learning to drive. It doesn't "matter" which car you're using for the basics, but certain cars, certain types of drives and what not may be easier to learn with because there's less things to keep track of, more intuitive controls, and so on. But a lot of the skills will be transferrable.
Unfortunately you won't intuitively know which skills are transferrable for a while. So if you are enjoying programming, I would absolutely recommend you to experiment with different things than what you do at school. Play with some html/javascript, or try to set up python and write a simple hello world program, etc. I think it will be very useful.
One common thread across most languages is that spaces are used to delimit "things". So you'll seldom encounter a "thing" that spans multiple "words" (have spaces in it).
Are you enjoying the cold weather?
No. Sometimes the water is so cold things like washing your hands becomes annoying. My nose, hands and feet often get cold, and my socks often are of limited help. I should ask my parents for some gloves for when cold weather like this comes up my hands can be more protected.
Also, right now the temperature is 20 degrees and minimum temperatures will apparently be over 10 for the next few days so I figure it's only gonna be "fairly cold" rather than "damn cold" and the worst is over.
Alright then. I've heard (or maybe assume idk) that Java is fairly different from most other programming languages, albeit less than rust or Lua from what I've heard.
The usual gym routine, finally got to checkout a copy of The Design of Everyday Things, just kind of hung out! BUT, something great started this Thursday and that's artfight. Every July, there's two teams and you draw the other teams characters for points. Really, it's just a big art trade game. But I'm super duper excited about this year. I'm hoping to work on my speed and quality of art, trying to draw really good, really fast. I always look forward to this event, it's my fav.
Can you do a review once you finish that book? I love hearing what people think about it.
Not GP, but I had that book in one of my courses and it was eye-opening how a lot of things are cultural or context-dependent. IIRC there was a section in the book about some golden principles of design but my memory is hazy.
This book popped into my mind when I moved to the US and was struggling to figure out how to close the blinds. I had to watch a YouTube video and all I could think of was "How is holding the cord at a 30-degree or so angle and pulling it to release the blinds intuitive at all?!" :)
Yeah! I can do that. It'd probably help with retaining the information as I'm also reading it for work lol