It's getting fancy.

Since I'm basically making up for my missing slogs because of the elbow fracture, the impression about the first few weeks may be a little vague for me. However, first few weeks of 148 still gave me some deep impressions: Wow, it's getting fancier and fancier!

I was doing 108 in last semester and basically I was just mimicking the way Tom was coding. Because I didn't know anything about programming before, I had to start from the basic level. I went through many simple functions and followed the instruction and format strictly at most of the time. In 3 assignment, I was told to implement all the functions given rather than writing the main program or some new classes.

Things changed significantly at the very beginning of 148 (everything's opened up!) In the first week, Danny let us explore and examine Class in a so much deeper way than what we did in 108. Many functions (such as __init__) that once were barely understood by us now seemed to have clear meanings. As we were gaining deeper insight into Class and Subclass, we started to take a look at its applications such as creating class Queue and Stack based on built-in class List.

Among all these new stuffs that looked so fancy, Recursion and Turtle are the two that impressed me the most. In 108 we were writing functions all the time and we didn't have any visualizing experience other than shell and call stacks. Turtle seemed so cool to me because it allowed me to draw something on an graphic interface by simply inputting command in shell. You can even add methods to draw more complicated graphs as you want. Though most students were already surprised by turtle, recursion appeared to be even more marvelous. As an cleverly designed algorithm, it's an ingenious function that takes in it's own result as an argument and keeps calculating until base case is reached. Though this algorithm is quite time-taking, it's intriguing idea and wide application (even in AI) should always be highlighted in the history of computer science.

Although some of the course contents appeared to be hard to understand, I found the first few weeks of the course were quite interesting and enlightening. It's also in this period of time that I found the beauty of this subject.