Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Programming Woes


After struggling through COS 126 to satisfy the computing requirement, I thought I was done with programming forever. Boy, was I wrong! It kept coming back to haunt me through Senior Year and now, my job requires me to be proficient in JAVA and MATLAB so I can design and model policy decisions using system dynamics (why didn't it say so in the job description?!) :'(

Yes, programming is useful and I respect and admire people who can program, who think like programmers. I've been told, it's intuitive- there's only so much one can learn from books and the internet. But the problem is, I don't want to learn! It simply doesn't interest me... my brain refuses to think like a programmer. And it's super-frustrating, staring at lines and lines of code for hours only to discover that I left out a semicolon or used parentheses instead of square brackets :P... Plus, everyone expects me to know it (after all, I studied engineering at Pton and people from there are supposed to be smart...)

But no, I shall not let it conquer my indomitable spirit... I shall stay up all night learning JAVA even if I'd rather be baking apple-pie for my (non-existent) farmer-husband coming home after a day of hard work. 

And here's a cutesy quote:

"As you ramble through life whatever be your goal, keep your eyes upon the doughnut and not upon the hole."

13 comments:

  1. if only you had caught me about 3 years early... i could have helped... if just for the sake of keeping my own programmin skills in java and matlab going...

    unfortunately been three years since i have touched either... a bit more actually !

    ps... i love programming... it is so coooool

    a bit like writing you know... when you write a story.. you are the GOD of that story.. whateva happens is what you tell it to happen

    similar is programming... you suddenly become GOD of what program you are writing... !

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  2. Wow... I'm like... all impressed :). I'd enjoy writing if I actually understood the language, sadly, that is not the case.

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  3. well... u r sayin programmin is not at all known to u.. how can that be ?

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  4. it's like copying sentences written in another language... you know how to "write" but you don't get what it means, i know how to write for loops and functions to make the planets spins to 2001: A Space Odyssey :S(does that count?)

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  5. welll thats a start isnt it

    i think you are struggling with object oriented programming..

    is that right?

    (i used to teach java to kids at my uni... lol)

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  6. spot on! i'm trying to compare NPV and IRR values for investments over a period of time, so writing functions for that- except, i'm not quite sure if i should be using arrays or collection variables (they both basically do the same thing...).... arrrgh! *tears of frustration*

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  7. awww... i seriously feel like helpin ya... maybe some day we can have a white board session online or somthin..

    on msn or somthin...

    you just need to learn to visualize things a certain way.. and from then on it becomes a breeze :)

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  8. thanks... that would be great! i think it's mostly not knowing how to do certain things... like accessing arraylists from another class :S

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  9. HMM... at the moment that does not ring a bell... lol... ages since i played with those things.. but yea.. feel free to mail me or whateva... :)

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  10. I know I might regret having said this, but MATLAB was a turn-on!

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  11. You took COS 126 to satisfy the requirement? I did something similar - I don't remember the number, but it was the easiest COS class offered. I am definitely not an intuitive programmer - or at least, I wasn't then. It all seemed like giberish to me!

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  12. oh i jus lovvvvvvvvvv matlab :D

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  13. @ Absar, ummm... ok, maybe for people like you :)
    @ Mishi, I know what you mean...!
    @ AS, ouch :O

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