Post #3: Assignment 1 and Week Overview

This post is focused on what we did this week, my thoughts on exercise 2, and my progress with Assignment 1.

This week's content was focused on recursion. Again, I know we have to write on recursion in detail during the seventh week, so I'll talk about my first impressions with recursion. I wasn't completely shocked bu the idea of recursion as I've heard of it but never engaged in it, but after the lectures I was really intrigued by the concept. I did have a few problems initially understanding in the first few examples that Prof Heap gave us in the beginning. This was mainly because of the code that was being used. Heap advocates for list comprehensions and ternary statements--which are fantastic, but I don't feel it is the best way to introduce recursion, I feel if he showed us the iterative version, than the condensed version, I would have had a clearer understanding initially.

Moving on to exercise 2. Overall, the exercise was pretty easy, I spent about 30 minutes in total and it wasn't overwhelming at all. It was a simple exercise that dealt with raising and catching exceptions. Although it was easy, it gave me a helpful reminder of the usefulness of catching exceptions for A1.


With that being said, I also wanted to mention my impressions and progress with Assignment 1. The assignment requires us to implement a model and controller for a "model-view-controller" program that it pretty much Towers of Hanoi with cheese and stools.

When the assignment was released I took some time to read the instructions and get a clear idea of what was expected. Something I noticed immediately was that this assignment compared to 108 assignments are completely different; it was much more vague and less technical and structured. You are expected to make an abstract idea into code. This is great! I love that we have more freedom and a room for some creativity.

Up to today, I've finished 70% of the assignment. I took it slow and went over my code multiple times before moving on to the next steps. I noticed that almost all the concepts we have learned so far are included in the assignment: ADT's, Classes, Recursion, and Exceptions.

I feel this assignment is aimed at teaching the student to understand how to understand other people's code and how (if you were hired to do work) to implement your code with theirs.

I started early on purpose because I knew that the final portion of the assignment involves a recursive function. I wanted to strengthen my understanding of recursion before moving on, which I have. Tom morrow I will be starting the final two steps of the assignment.