#Throwbackthursday; more shoutouts

Been looking at some of my old posts and, besides my unnecessarily chatty writing style and revealing psychological profile (hates complicated shopping lists; does not play well with others) I have come up with a few highlights to comment on.

First, and unsurprisingly, the theme of recursion. In some way or another, the whole second half of the course has involved using recursion in some way (perhaps the only exception was walking through linked lists with 'while' loops).  I did not talk about how hard Assignment 2 was for me; those wounds are still being licked.  It was Minimax hell. I wrote and rewrote that friggin' method, despite understanding perfectly what I wanted it to do, and crawled desperately to Prof Heap's office hours, where the wait time was longer than the Minor Injuries triage at Toronto General Hospital (source: broke my toe once).  But Prof Heap displayed an unrivaled kindness and patience and stayed late (very late) to assist those of us who were struggling, in part because we lacked TA assistance due to the strike.

Anyway, I never really made peace with Minimax, but I did make peace with recursion (see "my bugaboo" post for a direct comparison).  I am finding it easier to apply recursive techniques, which I think is a sentiment mirrored in several other students' SLOGs. I already wrote about Nadine, who struggled with recursion but has since come to terms with it and with Linked Lists. Gamerbornprogrammer wrote that they also struggled with Minimax, although they didn't go into detail on their issues with recursion, to me Minimax is a pretty solid litmus test of one's comfort in that area.

The only one who's been on top of it the whole time (that I came across) was Christian. He seems quite at ease with recursion, and even likes it--too bad I didn't come across his blog sooner, could have helped me out.  In fact, wafflemachine pointed me towards his blog. Wafflemachine seems to have a similar view to mine on this topic-- recursion is cool, elegant, can be a challenge to wrap your head around though.

Secondly, I'd like to address my post "Character Flaws." I have to admit that I was pretty worried about my inability to collaborate when I wrote that post.

But Assignments 2 and 3 (mostly Assignment 3) have really boosted my confidence in this regard. I took my time reading through the starter code, and since we had no alternative but to use it, I had no alternative but to understand it. I found that I actually could follow along with the style and eventually understand what the functions/methods were doing, despite not having created them myself.  I am still afraid of others' code --in particular, code that is not designed to be high-comprehension (I feel like the profs made it easy to understand).  Stuff like this freaks me out (scroll down) and this seems like a level of brevity that I will never attain. That might be because I don't understand map and lambda yet.  But the longer programs are what really scare me. How can I debug something if I barely know what it does? Makes me feel a bit foolish.  Anyway, baby steps. I do feel like the material in this course is well-structured in terms of pushing the boundaries of what we understand on multiple fronts, and helping us develop multiple programming skillsets (writing from scratch, writing from starter code, writing in general).

Really appreciating it so far.