A summary of my life so far…

I am not stupid. I know that. I want to get that out of the way first.

I am very inexperienced, at everything, this is because I have spent my life flitting from thing to thing, never committing to anything, never having the drive and focus of the people who succeed. Some people always knew what they wanted, some people spent their whole lives driving for that one thing, that one thing that they always knew they were destined for.

Beginner thoughts…

This past week I have spent some time writing, scrapping, rewriting etc. something in Python to get my head around both using classes and python in general.

Tonight I have been thinking about this in comparison with my experiences with C so far.
A lot of websites on the internet mention that they think Python is a good first language, a good teaching language and so on. I don’t know that I entirely agree, as basically pretty much a beginner to programming, I think C is much better to start with, or was for me and probably would be for people with my personality at least.

I’ll explain why, and also why people with a slightly different personality might find the opposite. What I like a lot about C is how much it has taught me about how things work. How much insight, this short time with it, it has given me into exactly what is happening. Every little thing I had to figure out how to do in C showed me something new about what happens when my computer does that thing. All the stuff with pointers, memory allocation etc, I loved that precisely because I had never thought about it before, I had never thought exactly how programs deal with memory or how they know where information is or pass references to memory addresses or anything like that. Now that I have thought about it seems criminal to me that I never thought about it before then, but I hadn’t. I think most people who have never done this sort of thing before would similarly not have thought about those kind of really basic things, and C forces you to think about it.

Python on the other hand, does not, everything I’ve had to find out how to do has been a matter of finding out which module to include and what words to use to get the thing to magically do what I want. OK, I know it is possible to look deeper and find out what is going on, but the truth is, when I am in the middle of trying to get something to work I am not gonna get distracted by looking into what is going on at a deeper level. And yet, despite that, the reality is I am a lot more interested in “what is going on” than making things work.

And this is why I think it in some senses comes down to personality. It is also why I think I never really got into computers properly until I tried Linux. Because someone whose primary interest is in creating things, they might well, even without discovering Linux, find themselves driven to create things and get into that, but me, I never felt a drive to create things – oh I enjoy it, its always nice to finish something and have something to show for yourself – but what really excites me is finding out how things work. And when I had windows, how things work was kind of obscured to me in many ways, whereas, the most glorious thing about Linux is that, its transparent, you can look into everything about it and have a real hope of one day understanding it – or at least, if you can’t it is because of your own limitations and not because anything is hidden from you. That is so cool.

I can completely see the advantage of programming languages which do a lot of more low level stuff behind the scenes, and I think one day I might prefer that too, when I know a lot more, when things that for me now are like “wow, so that is what is going on” have turned into “ugh, I can’t believe I have to do this EVERY TIME” then you can bet I will be singing the praises of Python, I can see that day off in the distance, but for now I like C better, because I don’t know the basics, because I don’t know what is going on and its all magic to me, and anything that can make that magic into something more comprehensible, anything that beats me over the head with what it is actually doing, is something that I want and need right now.

In some ways I think it comes down to a lack of imagination. I don’t imagine what I don’t know until it sneaks up on me and laughs mockingly, and at the moment I don’t know most anything. Yet I find it so delightful to find out new things. I think for me there is no greater pleasure than that moment when things fall into place and I actually finally understand something.
I literally live just for those moments.

I have discovered Markov chains…

LOL

I meant at the age of 30 at which time your absorption of various environmental factors as well as your hormones will flatline. If you play with the CLI.

also

I.e. the reptile demons are both the evil force controlling the government and the energy saving bulbs in our house but they haven’t blown just yet. One fell out of my computers just to show off and brag about what dicks they are.

Hee hee hee hee

I am doing my tamagotchi virtual pet program in C and passing my strings around and changing them between functions and all sorts, and getting compiler warnings galore in my tests. And google says to me “you have to allocate memory you n00b”.

So I am going to allocate some memory. Then (hopefully) free it at the right time.

It’s so exciting! It seems like such a powerful and deep thing to be able to do. Mwahahaha. Wow…

I love this…

Nostalgiafest

Being an impressionable young lady…

Being an impressionable young lady when people suggest to me that I learn python, well I give it a go.

I decided, what would be a fun way to go at this project? And I decided to make a text adventure game. Each chapter, I decided, would use a few new functions since the last, and so slowly but surely I would learn the functions and how to apply them in practical situations, and, I theorised, it would all happen in such a smooth progressive way that I’d hardly notice I was learning new things :p.

However, I also wanted each chapter to be a separate file so it would be simple to work on them one at a time. Which means that right at the outset I have to get the hang of this confusing “import” thing.
“Import isn’t confusing” I hear you say, well I suggest you google it, the very first page says:

The import and from-import statements are a constant cause of serious confusion for newcomers to Python.

So there, that proves it.

Anyway I just imported a module which does nothing but set a variable then print it, into a script that does nothing but print the same variable. The variable prints twice when I run it. Ok… I agree… its not that confusing… lol, at least not in that context.

But what I want to do is save all the variables that the person running the game inputs, basic things like character name, the items in their inventory and so on. I’ve got the hang of setting the variables. I’ve not quite got the hang of the syntax of actually printing stuff (I swear that two identical syntaxes are getting me alternate results!). I have the basic idea of this importing thing, but have yet to make it work in practice. I am faaaaar away from saving the variables…

But its fun eh? This is a fun way to spend a summer. Best summer I ever had I think, but to tell the truth I have very poor concept of past states of mind. I’m not saying I’m all zen and in the now, but just that everytime I am happy I feel like “this is the happiest I have ever been it will be like this forever” and everytime I am sad I feel like “this is the worst thing in the world, I will never again taste joy”. So even if I say “I never had more fun in my life” which is how I feel. I could be wrong.

And now to the “what the heck is wrong with my syntax mobile!” Mwahahahahaha!