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I snuck into the roster for an intro to Object Oriented Class when I started grad school, which was taught in Java. I took physics with the engineers in colleg

I snuck into the roster for an intro to Object Oriented Class when I started grad school, which was taught in Java. I took physics with the engineers in college and this was about as hard conceptually for me. But it was one of those things where it was hard until I stepped away for a while and then came back to it. Then it wasn't so hard anymore. Just too much info to take in at once I found. Loops were the hard part. Oh man. Loops. that took forever to "get."

amrithk 18y ago
Recursion for me. I still grapple with it sometimes.
- trevelyan 18y ago
  Recursion is really fun until you have to use it to solve something under pressure.
  - sadfsa 18y ago
    Recursion is easy if you're used to it. A recursive procedure just looks like a loop to me.
- mlLK 18y ago
  My first programming class (or my first class I had to use a compiler) was in C (it was one of those CSCI classes for non-majors) and this guy took us through the whole gamut, even if I barely passed the class, it was a rush. It was probably such a rush because I knew what I wanted to do, but had no idea how to express it, until we finally got to arrays, and I realized that a string is just an array of sorted characters. This insight catalyzed another insight and by the end of the year I was more interested in recursing meaningless input just to see what it looked like when it came out, which never really solved anything in my text-book, but this act taught me more about computer programming than any book could, this act showed me that computer programming is the art of counting and comparing for measuring an unknown order of magnitude. I came out of the course with so much more than what my grade reflected (somewhere between a D and C), but could really care less. One semester later I ended up in a class called Object Oriented Analysis and Design; [insert brain hemorrhage here] I could not communicate with any of these people (nor my teacher) ever since the problem domain was suddenly so tangible, it seemed so much less enticing. This was when I laid my eccentric theory to rest, went with the flow, and started solving my exercises.
sadfsa 18y ago
Loops would probably be easier to teach if they taught "goto" first. "Goto" is easy for beginners to grasp, and loops can be taught in terms of it.
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  I started thinking of Loops as "repeaters" "Ok. First I need to make my variables. Ok. There they ok. Good. Now I need to figure out what I want to do with them. Ok. That's that. Now I need to repeat this 5 times, so I need a repeater loop..." That's kind of how it looked. Writing a program to tabulate diving scores was fun!

amrithk 18y ago

Recursion for me. I still grapple with it sometimes.

trevelyan 18y ago
Recursion is really fun until you have to use it to solve something under pressure.
- sadfsa 18y ago
  Recursion is easy if you're used to it. A recursive procedure just looks like a loop to me.
mlLK 18y ago
My first programming class (or my first class I had to use a compiler) was in C (it was one of those CSCI classes for non-majors) and this guy took us through the whole gamut, even if I barely passed the class, it was a rush. It was probably such a rush because I knew what I wanted to do, but had no idea how to express it, until we finally got to arrays, and I realized that a string is just an array of sorted characters. This insight catalyzed another insight and by the end of the year I was more interested in recursing meaningless input just to see what it looked like when it came out, which never really solved anything in my text-book, but this act taught me more about computer programming than any book could, this act showed me that computer programming is the art of counting and comparing for measuring an unknown order of magnitude. I came out of the course with so much more than what my grade reflected (somewhere between a D and C), but could really care less. One semester later I ended up in a class called Object Oriented Analysis and Design; [insert brain hemorrhage here] I could not communicate with any of these people (nor my teacher) ever since the problem domain was suddenly so tangible, it seemed so much less enticing. This was when I laid my eccentric theory to rest, went with the flow, and started solving my exercises.

sadfsa 18y ago

Loops would probably be easier to teach if they taught "goto" first. "Goto" is easy for beginners to grasp, and loops can be taught in terms of it.

brandnewlow 18y ago
I started thinking of Loops as "repeaters" "Ok. First I need to make my variables. Ok. There they ok. Good. Now I need to figure out what I want to do with them. Ok. That's that. Now I need to repeat this 5 times, so I need a repeater loop..." That's kind of how it looked. Writing a program to tabulate diving scores was fun!