too wordy

The following is an essay I had to write for my programming fundamentals course on what experience I have with programming, when I started, and what I expected of the course. Oh, and my preferred “nickname” for some reason.

I don’t have a very cohesive nickname amongst my friends, seeing as I have friends in very different circles. My nicknames have ranged from “Miggy,” to “Chat-hat,” to “Mickey,” and on and on. I prefer however, to just go by “Miguel.” My family already calls me by middle name so I’d rather not have more aliases to keep track of.

I started programming just last year. It’s felt like so long, yet I’ve learned so much… And yet so little.

My story is an unusual one I suppose. I don’t have too much perspective on it yet so forgive me if I don’t condense it very much. Rewind to the summer of 2010 and you would have seen a very different me. I was a journalism major transferring into UF from Miami Dade College, intent on becoming a political or multimedia reporter.

I worked my butt off and did anything I could to get an edge here at the Journalism college. I wrote for the Alligator, looked for internships, and tried to learn as much as humanly possible from every class I had. The ambition, ironically enough, led me to learn Javascript (hey, I had to start somewhere) on my own after taking a Communication on the Internet class. It was meant to be a class on getting journalism students more web oriented by learning HTML and CSS and learning how to make a personal website. Just another cute skill to have on your resume… Or at least I thought.

After my first semester was over, what started for me as just furthering that small skill by learning client-side scripting, became an exponentially growing interest in all things programming. At one point, I thought to myself, “Why am I learning this on the side? Why can’t I… JUST do this?”

And that was it. I was sold. It was all blur from then on out. I looked up resources on the Internet, books in the local Barnes n’ Noble. I stumbled through Python and developed a love and hate relationship with PHP. Read up on Database programming with MySQL and SQL. Worked on making my own CMS. Forgot most of PHP and SQL. Learned C and messed around creating useless, yet challening one-trick pony programs on Linux. Re-learned PHP and SQL and made registration and login systems on some websites I did for friends. And, well, here I am. Still a journalism major, but intent on finishing the degree with a computer science minor, in hopes of transferring to the graduate school for computer science here at UF.

Yes, I’ll admit, this course is on my curriculum for my minor. But I’ll have you know that I hassled my advisor to get into it instead of the typical two semester introductory course. I wanted to challenge myself and learn what it really means to be a computer scientist. Not just go through the basic “Hello World,” introductory class (that I’ve already found in many an online video) and stop just short of functions.

I disagree that this class will not make you a better programmer. I believe that it contains perhaps the most important skills you need to program. We in this industry have our programming languages and knowledge of current technology outdated every two years if we don’t keep up. Five years and you’re likely to be unemployable. However, while the technical may change, whether it be some some hot new language or new techonological advancement, what you have in your head doesn’t (for the most part). The thought process that makes programming possible is the only constant. I believe if you master good coding practices, useful algorithms, and logical thinking, you’ll be better suited to adapt to changing times.

This class won’t teach me Java in its entirety and that’s okay. I’ve been too practical, learning language after language and working nonstop on projects for a while now because I thought that’s what would make me “hire-able,” or even put me anywhere near the same level as the CIS majors. But theory is just as, if not more, important. This is what I hope to get out of this class.

Wrote my first 500-line program today. When I coded line 500, the first thing that went into my head wasn’t a sense of pride. No, it was something like, “Christ, this is going to have MILLIONS of bugs.”

Miguel,

This is your individual score report for programming assignment # 1.

Regards.

=============== Score Report of PA#1 =================
 
Student Name: Chateloin, Miguel A
Student ID: 44827472
 
1. Compilability: 40 out of 40 
 
2. Correctness: 40 out of 40 
 
3. Programming Style: 20 out of 20 
 
4. TOTAL Score: 100 out of 100
 
4. Overall Comments: EXCELLENT WORK, Miguel!! I congratulate you on scoring full points for a commendable programming style. The use of comments and indentation are a practice adopted by any good programmer. Keep up the good work!

I’ve always thought that investing the time to have a working knowledge of topics like sports, movies, politics, and various pop cultural references would be a huge waste, even though these are common conversational topics.

Yet, I spend hours on Wikipedia reading up on obscure non-conversational information like the various species of anoles found throughout North America.

It’s a type of iguana belonging to the polychrotinae subfamily.

Now don’t get me wrong, trivial knowledge is cool to have. Naturally, I’m a fairly decent conversationalist, and I’ve always gotten by with little of the general “conversation-worthy” information.

However, my situation at the moment is a bit dire. I’m studying way more right now due to the five classes I have and the programming project I’m trying to do on my own time. As a result, I stay cooped in more, don’t talk as much, and I’m not maintaining my natural ability to talk out of my ass. Conversations now feel more socially awkward…

…By the way, although anoles look and act like American chameleons or geckos, they are in fact more closely related to iguanas. Common misconception.

If Microsoft Word can check your grammar to some degree of accuracy, why isn’t there a program out there that can help with AP or MLA style? This is my next (somewhat in the distant future) project.

I got the idea as I was sitting in Basic Reporting class, listening to my professor stress about how we needed to question everything and refer to the AP Stylebook as much as possible when we write our stories.

Every journalist uses the AP Stylebook. Every one of them has, at one time or another, frantically flipped through pages to find out how to write one miserable acronym. The new AP Stylebook app has made that much easier by letting you search and bookmark specific style rules.

But you still have to look through the story itself and pick things out.

That’s where a “style-checker” would come in. I’m not saying it would be 100 percent accurate, no program could do that! Except, of course, with a processing power of several teraflops per second and seven servers full of data like IBM’s Watson.

It should be able to alert you to areas in your writing or certain words where it might be best to look something up.

e.g. The program searches your story and finds the word, “collided,” in the sentence, “The car collided with the tree.” It alerts you by saying something along the lines of, “A ‘collision’ involves two moving objects coming in contact with each other. A ‘crash’ is when a moving object comes in contact with another object that is not moving.”

Without highly sophisticated language comprehension software, the program wouldn’t actually be able to tell you if you were wrong or not. It would only alert you of areas where common style rules could apply. You then realize that you were wrong and correct it by writing, “The car crashed into the tree.”

Some things could be fixed with total accuracy though.

e.g. “The ceremony started at 6 PM in the courtyard.”

“The ceremony started at 6 p.m. in the courtyard.”

Sure, you wouldn’t rely on this to get a story ready for print. Some more complex style and grammar issues are simply beyond computation (for now), but it would certainly expedite the process of editing a story.